Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier rendered as Remembrance of Things Past), published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. These Marcel Proust quotes will motivate you.
Best Marcel Proust Quotes
1. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” ~ Marcel Proust
2. “Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.” ~ Marcel Proust
3. “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” ~ Marcel Proust
4. “My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.” ~ Marcel Proust
5. “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” ~ Marcel Proust
6. “When you work to please others you can’t succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone’s interest.” ~ Marcel Proust
7. “The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.” ~ Marcel Proust
8. “We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.” ~ Marcel Proust
9. “One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.” ~ Marcel Proust
10. “It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.” ~ Marcel Proust
11. “Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.” ~ Marcel Proust
12. “Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.” ~ Marcel Proust
13. “Desire makes everything blossom” ~ Marcel Proust
14. “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.” ~ Marcel Proust
15. “If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.” ~ Marcel Proust
16. “Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.” ~ Marcel Proust
17. “Love is space and time measured by the heart.” ~ Marcel Proust
18. “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.” ~ Marcel Proust
19. “We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.” ~ Marcel Proust
20. “Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.” ~ Marcel Proust
21. “If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.” ~ Marcel Proust
22. “In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.” ~ Marcel Proust
23. “Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.” ~ Marcel Proust
24. “Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.” ~ Marcel Proust
25. “We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.” ~ Marcel Proust
26. “The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.” ~ Marcel Proust
27. “There is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life. Such grief, felt in such a way is always present, it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again.” ~ Marcel Proust
28. “A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” ~ Marcel Proust
29. “We love only what we do not wholly possess.” ~ Marcel Proust
30. “You can’t learn the truth about a man’s intentions by asking him.” ~ Marcel Proust
31. “An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.” ~ Marcel Proust
32. “We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.” ~ Marcel Proust
33. “Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.” ~ Marcel Proust
34. “When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one” ~ Marcel Proust
35. “Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.” ~ Marcel Proust
36. “Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.” ~ Marcel Proust
37. “People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.” ~ Marcel Proust
38. “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.”
39. “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.” ~ Marcel Proust
40. “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.” ~ Marcel Proust
41. “Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.” ~ Marcel Proust
42. “It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.” ~ Marcel Proust
43. “Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.” ~ Marcel Proust
44. “Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.” ~ Marcel Proust
45. “One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.” ~ Marcel Proust
46. “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.” ~ Marcel Proust
47. “As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.” ~ Marcel Proust
48. “We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.” ~ Marcel Proust
49. “The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.” ~ Marcel Proust
50. “No man is a complete mystery except to himself.” ~ Marcel Proust
51. “Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon.” ~ Marcel Proust
52. “Nine-tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.” ~ Marcel Proust
53. “The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.” ~ Marcel Proust
54. “People don’t know when they are happy. They’re never so unhappy as they think they are.” ~ Marcel Proust
55. “The courage of one’s opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the “other side.” ~ Marcel Proust
56. “The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do [with great artists]; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.” ~ Marcel Proust
57. “It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.” ~ Marcel Proust
58. “Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.” ~ Marcel Proust
59. “Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.” ~ Marcel Proust
60. “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.” ~ Marcel Proust
61. “We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.” ~ Marcel Proust
62. “We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.” ~ Marcel Proust
63. “When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are
broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.” ~ Marcel Proust
