"All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last."
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Marcel Proust quotes (page 7 of 22)
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"A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it."
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"A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us."
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"There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief."
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"The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgment, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life-and therefore we judge it disparagingly."
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"The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world."
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"These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development."
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"The disinterest [of my two great-aunts] in anything that had to do with high society was such that their sense of hearing ... put to rest its receptor organs and allowed them to suffer the true beginnings of atrophy."
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"The character we exhibit in the latter half of our life need not necessarily be, though it often is, our original character, developed further, dried up, exaggerated, or diminished. It can be its exact opposite, like a suit worn inside out."
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"We love only what we do not wholly possess."
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"Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present."
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"Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments."
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"We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body."
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"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."
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"To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion"
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"It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions"
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"Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds."
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"...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul."
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"The true voyage of discovery is not a journey to a new place; it is learning to see with new eyes."
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"Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals."
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