Marcel Proust Quotes

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

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

The true voyage of discovery is not a journey to a new place; it is learning to see with new eyes.

The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

In love, happiness is an abnormal state.

Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands, but at leastin our thoughts where we may dispose of them at our whim, which gives us the illusion of power over them.

How else learn the real, if not by inventing what might lie outside it?

L’ide e qu’on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l’ide e qu’un autre est mort. The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.

One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.

A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.