Quotes From Famous Authors

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All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
Marcel Proust /In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower/

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.
Marcel Proust

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.
Marcel Proust /Time Regained/

Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.
Marcel Proust

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

It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.
Marcel Proust

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.
Marcel Proust /The Captive & The Fugitive/

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
Marcel Proust /In Search of Lost Time/

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.
Marcel Proust /Remembrance of Things Past/

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.
Marcel Proust /Remembrance of Things Past/

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
Marcel Proust /Maxims/

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.
Marcel Proust

Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.
Marcel Proust /In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower/

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.
Marcel Proust

The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.
Marcel Proust

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 /In Search of Lost Time/

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.
Marcel Proust

The thirst for something other than what we have…to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.
Marcel Proust /Swann's Way/

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.
Marcel Proust

There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible.
Marcel Proust

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail
Marcel Proust

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

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

We do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change.
Marcel Proust /In Search of Lost Time/