492 Powerful Marcel Proust Quotes to Inspire You
2. “For Swann was finding in things once more, since he had fallen in love, the charm that he had found when, in his adolescence, he had fancied himself an artist; with this difference, that what charm lay in them now was conferred by Odette alone.”
Marcel Proust
Love, Charm, Adolescence, Perception, Transformation, Personal Significance
3. “Because of the infinite quality of love, or its egotism, the intellectual and spiritual physiognomy of the people we love are the least objectively defined for us. We are constantly retouching them to suit our desires and our fears; we do not separate them from us; they are but an immense and vague place where our affections exteriorize themselves.”
Marcel Proust Love, Perception, Subjectivity, Affection, Projection, Emotional Distortion
4. “Now, since the self is constantly thinking numerous things, since it is nothing more than the thoughts of these things, when by chance, instead of having them as the objects of its attention, it suddenly turns its thoughts upon itself, it finds only an empty apparatus, something unfamiliar, to which, in order to give it some reality – it adds the memory of a face seen in a mirror.”
Marcel Proust Self, Thoughts, Perception, Identity, Reflection, Self-awareness
6. “Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands, but at least in our thoughts where we may dispose of them at our whim, which gives us the illusion of power over them.”
Marcel Proust Knowledge, Prevention, Control, Illusion, Power, Thought Manipulation
10. “There is, following an ample meal, a sort of pause in time, filled with a gentle slackening of thought and energy, when to sit doing nothing gives us a sense of life's richness and a feeling that the least effort would be intolerable. The melancholy we took with us to table has disappeared and, if we think of it at all it is only to smile, as at some black mood now past, its cause having gone. And with the melancholy, all scruple, all remorse departs from us.”
Marcel Proust Contentment, Laziness, Satisfaction, Melancholy, Indulgence, Temporal Perception
15. “If the idea of death during this period had, as we have seen, cast a gloom over love, the memory of love had for a long time now helped me not to be afraid of death. For I understood that dying was not something new but quite the reverse, that since my childhood I had already died a number of times.”
Marcel Proust Death, Love, Memory, Childhood, Transformation, Life Experiences
18. “We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.”
Marcel Proust Indifference, Emotional Investment, Joy Possibility, Perceptual Universe, Poetic Reality, Personal Connection
19. “Repeatedly, I dare say, when pretty girls went by, I had promised myself that I would see them again. As a rule, people do not appear a second time; moreover our memory, which speedily forgets their existence, would find it difficult to recall their appearance; our eyes would not recognise them, perhaps, and in the meantime we have seen new girls go by, whom we shall not see again either.”
Marcel Proust Lost Encounters, Memory Fade, Repetitive Promises, Unrecognizable Faces, Emotional Forgetfulness, Momentary Connections
22. “When a mind has a tendency towards day-dreams, it’s a mistake to shield it from them, to ration them. So long as you divert your mind from its day-dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will be the victim of all sorts of appearances because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.”
Marcel Proust Daydreaming, Emotional Escapism, Rational Diversion, Mental Reflection, Perceptual Reality, Cognitive Shifts
28. “There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.”
Marcel Proust Beauty, Grief, Emotional Decay, Loss Reflection, Perishable Life, Poetic Reflection
30. “The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”
Marcel Proust Emotional Bonds, Solitude, Memory Fading, Self Reflection, Illusion Of Connection, Emotional Solitude
