"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
— Marcel Proust

"Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
— Marcel Proust

"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."
— Marcel Proust

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

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

"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."
— Marcel Proust

"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

"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

"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: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain)

"Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way"
— Marcel Proust

""Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude" "
— Marcel Proust

"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 (Remembrance of Things Past Volume 1-3 Box Set)

"”I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran though me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that had happened to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin…this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?”"
— Marcel Proust (Swann's Way)

"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

"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

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

"Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them.
"
— Marcel Proust

"Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were."
— Marcel Proust

"...Hard people are weak people whom nobody wants, and the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that meekness which the common herd mistake for weakness."
— Marcel Proust

"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy: They are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
— Marcel Proust

"...the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time)

"The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years."
— Marcel Proust (Swann's Way)

"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

"Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove)

"Forgetting that beauty and happiness are only ever incarnated in an individual person, we replace them in our minds by a conventional pattern, a sort of average of all the different faces we have ever admired, all the different pleasures we have ever enjoyed, and thus carry about with us abstract images, which are lifeless and uninspiring because they lack the very quality that something new, something different from what is familiar, always possesses, and which is the quality inseparable from real beauty and happiness. So we make our pessimistic pronouncements on life, which we think are valid, in the belief that we have taken account of beauty and happiness, whereas we have actually omitted them from consideration, substituting for them synthetic compounds that contain nothing of them."
— Marcel Proust

"Now are the woods all black,
But still the sky is blue."
— Marcel Proust

"...the salient feature of the absurd age I was at--an age which for all its alleged awkwardness, is prodigiously rich-- is that reason is not its guide, and the most insignificant attributes of other people always appear to be consubstantial with their personality. One lives among monsters and gods, a stranger to peace of mind. There is scarcely a single one of our acts from that time which we would not prefer to abolish later on. But all we should lament is the loss of the spontaneity that urged them upon us. In later life, we see things with a more practical eye, one we share with the rest of society; but adolescence was the only time when we ever learned anything."
— 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 only true paradise is paradise lost"
— Marcel Proust

"No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove)

"Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people."
— Marcel Proust (Swann's Way)

"Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible. "
— 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. 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

"I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire..."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove)

""Now the same mystery which often veils from our eyes the reason for a catastrophe envelops just as frequently, when love is in question, the suddenness of certain happy solutions, such as had been brought to me by Gilberte's letter. Happy, or at least seemingly happy, for there are few that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment of such a kind that any satisfaction we can give it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion of being healed.""
— Marcel Proust

"The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing."
— Marcel Proust

"I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence..."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove)

"And it is because they contain thus within themselves the hours of the past that human bodies have the power to hurt so terribly those who love them, because they contain the memories of so many joys and desires already effaced for them, but still cruel for the lover who contemplates and prolongs in the dimension of Time the beloved body of which he is jealous, so jealous that he may even wish for its destruction. For after death Time withdraws from the body, and the memories, so indifferent, grown so pale, are effaced in her who no longer exists, as they soon will be in the lover whom for a while they continue to torment but in whom before long they will perish, once the desire that owed their inspiration to a living body is no longer there to sustain them. Profound Albertine, whom I at once saw sleeping, and who was dead."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI: Time Regained)

"Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline ... reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the Spirit."
— Marcel Proust

"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy. They are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. "
— Marcel Proust

"As for me, I feel myself living and thinking in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives profoundly different from mine, of a taste opposite to mine, where I find nothing of my conscious thought, where my imagination is excited by feeling itself plunged into the depths of the non-ego; I feel happy only when setting foot—on the Avenue de la Gare, on the Port, or on the Place de l'Eglise—in one of those provincial hotels with cold, long corridors where the wind from outside contends successfully with the efforts of the heating system, where the detailed geographic map of the district is still the sole ornament on the walls, where each noise helps only to make the silence appear by displacing it, where the rooms keep a musty perfume which the open air comes to wash, but does not eliminate, and which the nostrils inhale a hundred times in order to bring it to the imagination, which is enchanted with it, which has it pose like a model to try to recreate it with all the thoughts and remembrances that it contains..."
— Marcel Proust

"The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections."
— Marcel Proust (Within a Budding Grove: Pt. 2)

"Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life."
— Marcel Proust (Swann's Way)

"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

"It may be that I might have inferred from the pages that life teaches us to diminish the value of what we read, and shows us that the things which the writer commends to us were never worth very much; yet I might equally well have come to the opposite conclusion, that reading teaches us to place a higher value on life, a value which we did not know how to appreciate, and the true extent of which we come to realize only through the book."
— Marcel Proust

""I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.""
— Marcel Proust (Swann's Way)

"The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. "
— Marcel Proust

"Our desires interweave with one another; and in the confusion of existence, it is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire that longed for it."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove)

"For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety. "
— Marcel Proust