"A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped."
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Quote collection
Marcel Proust quotes (page 9 of 22)
429 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"To the pure all things are pure!"
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"When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation."
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"The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist."
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"No man is a complete mystery except to himself."
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"The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator."
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"The most familiar precepts are not always the truest."
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"I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence."
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"with one image he would make that beauty explode into me."
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"Truth is a point of view about things."
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"Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things."
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"Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much."
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"After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become."
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"The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter."
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"We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment."
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"When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves."
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"Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit."
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"This dim coolness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal; and so it was quite in harmony with my state of repose which (thanks to the enlivening adventures related in my books) sustained, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity."
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"It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension; whenit, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create."
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"For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel."
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