Marcel Proust Quotes

We love only what we do not wholly possess. Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again! The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world. Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night. When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment. 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. To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying. I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they are intelligent as long as they are kind, sincere, etc. It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad. The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present. Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice. It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind. One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one s mistress. When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation. We are less justified in saying that the thinking life of humanity is a miraculous perfectioning of animal and physical life than that it is an imperfection in the organization of spiritual life as rudimentary as the communal existence of protozoa in colonies. 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. According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love. Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors. Human altruism which is not egoism, is sterile. After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become. At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts. They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there. I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such when it first appears. A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is. All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality. Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter. It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying. Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.