Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

Quotes

• It is seldom indeed that one parts on good terms, because if one were on good terms, one would not part.

• Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into account.

• The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been 'great changes.'

• As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral.

• 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.

• The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome.

• Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

• People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

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

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

• Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

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

• The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.

• Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.

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

• The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.

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