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Quotes by Marcel Proust

  • The true paradises are paradises we have lost.
  • The opinions we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
  • The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
  • 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.
  • And all the winds go sighing, For sweet things dying.
  • The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
  • We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond.
  • The happy man is not he who seems thus to others, but who seems thus to himself.
  • A catherdral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
  • Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
  • Let us be grateful to people who make us happy They are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
  • Love is space and time measured by the heart.
  • Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
  • We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take us or spare us.
  • The only paradise is paradise lost.
  • Desire makes everything blossom possession makes everything wither and fade.
  • The one thing more difficult than following a regimen is not imposing it on others.