Quotes by Marcel Proust

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

— Marcel Proust

Happiness

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

— Marcel Proust

Wisdom

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

— Marcel Proust

Wisdom

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

— Marcel Proust

Education

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

— Marcel Proust

Wisdom

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

— Marcel Proust

Life

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

— Marcel Proust

Wisdom

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

— Marcel Proust

Happiness

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

— Marcel Proust

Love

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

— Marcel Proust

Wisdom

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

— Marcel Proust

Wisdom

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

— Marcel Proust

Wisdom

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

— Marcel Proust

Love

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

— Marcel Proust

Wisdom

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

— Marcel Proust

Education

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

— Marcel Proust

Education

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.

— Marcel Proust

Life

The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.

— Marcel Proust

Wisdom

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

— Marcel Proust

Love

The only paradise is paradise lost.

— Marcel Proust

Wisdom

Love is a reciprocal torture.

— Marcel Proust

Love

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

— Marcel Proust

Wisdom

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

— Marcel Proust

Wisdom

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

— Marcel Proust

Wisdom