"The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage."
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Quote collection
Marcel Proust quotes (page 10 of 22)
429 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us."
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"If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones, less an old-fashioned flower garden than a colour garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not entirely nature's, because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will bloom at the same time, harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink."
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"Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” - Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us from."
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"One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy."
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"Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible."
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"What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?"
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"The courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the "other side."
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"The one thing more difficult than following a regime is keeping from imposing it on others."
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"But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality."
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"All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality."
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"We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap."
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"Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them."
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"Every kiss provokes another. Oh, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring to life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May."
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"Photography is the product of complete alienation."
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"Daughters of the attitude that produced them, certain women will not appeal to us without the double bed in which we find peace by their side, while others, to be caressed with a more secret intention, require leaves blown by the wind, water rippling in the dark, things as light and fleeting as they are."
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"As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the Universe had appeared to me more interesting."
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"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."
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"The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes."
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"In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be."
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