Quotes by Marcel Proust

About Marcel Proust:

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust is considered by many to be one of the greatest authors of all time.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

Marcel Proust

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

Marcel Proust

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

Marcel Proust

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

Marcel Proust

I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it–our life–hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, ...

Marcel Proust

The best vaccine against anger is to watch others in its throes.

Marcel Proust

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

Marcel Proust

Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.

Marcel Proust

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

Marcel Proust

As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, ins...

Marcel Proust

[...] to me a new book was not one of a number of similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no cause of existence beyond himself [...]

Marcel Proust

In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when...

Marcel Proust

The fault I find in our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other everyday, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.

Marcel Proust

A book is no mere book anymore than man can be mere man. A book was like an individual man, unmatched and with no cause of existence beyond himself.

Marcel Proust

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were tr...

Marcel Proust

Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. ...

Marcel Proust

... Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart.

Marcel Proust

... that distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable...

Marcel Proust

A 'sadist' of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be...

Marcel Proust

This was to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some even greater variation, that she did not pass through those abnormal hours in which one thirsts for something different from what one has, when those people who, through lack of ener...

Marcel Proust

We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.

Marcel Proust

Author Bio

  • NameMarcel Proust
  • DescriptionFrench novelist, critic, and essayist
  • AliasesValentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
  • BornJuly 10, 1871
  • DiedNovember 18, 1922
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionLibrarian; Novelist; Essayist
  • WorksWithin A Budding Grove
  • AwardsPrix Goncourt; Knight Of The Legion Of Honour