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Quotes from In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past — Marcel Proust

1871–1922 France

← All quotes by Marcel Proust

27 quotes

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

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures become, by habit, permanent.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

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

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promises only; pain we obey.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

Love is space and time made tender to the heart.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

Quant au bonheur, il n’a presque qu’une seule utilité, rendre le malheur possible.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

In love, happiness is an abnormal state.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

In this way, the mansions arranged along either bank of the canal made one think of objects of nature, but of a nature which seemed to have created its works with a human imagination.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

Fashions, being themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change also.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.

In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Marcel Proust (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.