Quotes by Marcel Proust

“Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.””

“My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.””

“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.””

“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.””

“The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.””

“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.””

“It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.””

“Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way””

“Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade. ””

“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.””

“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.””

“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.””

“Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them.””