Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust

Novelist

Marcel Proust was a French novelist known for his profound exploration of memory and time in his major work, 'In Search of Lost Time.'

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Born
July 10, 1871
Died
November 18, 1922
Quotes
429
Rank
#142

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Marcel Proust quotes (page 20 of 22)

429 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

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"This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life."

Passion Mean Pride
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"Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two."

Years Names Two
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"Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several."

Women Example Warning
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"...Hard people are weak people whom nobody wants, and the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that meekness which the common herd mistake for weakness."

Strong Mistake Caring
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"Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart."

Grief Heart Ideas
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"The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius."

Art Opportunity Genius
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"There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning -- without altogether recognizing it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behavior which it assumes in his presence."

Vices Assuming Virtue
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"Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock."

Rocks Order Growth
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"It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world but upon a doll inside our head, the only woman who is always available in fact, the only one we shall ever possess, whom the arbitrary nature of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the real Balbec had been from the Balbec I imagined- a dummy creation that little by little, to our own detriment, we shall force the real woman to resemble."

Memories Real Imagination
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"How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?"

Lying Love Is Suffering
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"Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales."

Fashion Son Aristocracy
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"A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness."

Dream Fall Sleep
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"Fashions, being themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change also."

Fashion Desire
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"Le bonheur est dans l'amour un e tat anormal. In love, happiness is abnormal."

Abnormal Amour L Amour
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"La me decine a fait quelques petits progre' s dans ses connaissances depuis Molie' re, mais aucun dans son vocabulaire. Medicine has made a few, small advances in knowledge since Molie' r e, but none in its vocabulary."

Son Vocabulary Medicine
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"La possession de ce qu'on aime est une joie plus grande encore que l'amour. Possessing what one loves is an even greater joy than love itself."

Love Is Joy One Love
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"L'adulte' re introduit l'esprit dans la lettre quebien souvent le mariage e u" t laisse e morte. Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead."

New Life Adultery Breathe
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"Do you suppose that it is within your power to insult me? You evidently are not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?"

August Gentleman Littles
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"You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?' I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.' That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky."

Father Sky Tree
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"The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable."

Art Reality Quality
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