Quotes by Marcel Proust

A man who, night after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever dream of making, I do not say great discoveries, but even minute observations upon sleep? He barely knows that he does sleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory.

This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have been difficult for me to understand. It was a very long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama, “Go with the boy.” The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me.

Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before ones eyes, of the various events of ones life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables ones to resuscitate dead recollections, but even then, there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable.

Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all.

I came to recognise that, apart from her [Françoises] own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching to seek pleasure elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth.

For her [Françoise], wealth was like a necessary condition without which virtue would lack both merit and charm. She made so little distinction between the two that she came to see their qualities as interchangeable, expecting material comfort from virtue and moral edification from wealth.

He could see her, but dared not remain for fear of annoying her by seeming to be spying upon the pleasures which she tasted in other company, pleasures which - while he drove home in utter loneliness, and went to bed, as anxiously as I myself was to go to bed, some years later, on the evenings when he came to dine with us at Combray - seemed illimitable to him since he had not been able to see their end.

My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more readiness for the very reason which, to our minds, ought to have made it more unbearable; namely, that such a seclusion was forced upon her by the gradual and steady diminution in her strength which she was able to measure daily, which, by making every action, every movement tiring to her if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the blessed, strengthening and refreshing charm of repose.

She was not yet dead. But I was already alone.

There is no man...however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man...

What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.

Forgive me, Bertrand, for having on that day loved in you a beauty in which your self-esteem could take no pride, which could not in any way determine my affection.

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

His jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five oclock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again. But Swann was incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without.

Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.

I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving.

Every individual who makes us suffer can be attached by us to a divinity of which he or she is a mere fragmentary reflexion, the lowest step in the ascent that leads to it, a divinity or an Idea which, if we turn to contemplate it, immediately gives us joy instead of the pain which we were feeling before — indeed the whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer as a step enabling us to draw nearer to the divine form which they reflect and thus joyously to people our lives with divinities.