Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust

22 quotes

The French novelist, literary critic, and essayist Marcel Proust is someone whose pithy observations have become part of everyday conversation. Beyond his novel À la recherche du temps perdu, which was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927, Marcel Proust proved equally skilled at capturing ideas in a sentence or two. Discover 32 of Marcel Proust's most memorable quotes, ranging across Time, Men, Medical, Knowledge, and Intelligence. One standout: "Love is space and time measured by the heart."

“Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.”

— Marcel Proust

Nature

All Quotes by Marcel Proust

“A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.”

— Marcel Proust

Change

“It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.”

— Marcel Proust

Alone

“Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.”

— Marcel Proust

Intelligence

“Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only pain we obey.”

— Marcel Proust

Knowledge

“Love is space and time measured by the heart.”

— Marcel Proust

Time

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

— Marcel Proust

Time

“Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.”

— Marcel Proust

Change

“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

Time

“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”

— Marcel Proust

Work

“The time at our disposal each day is elastic the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.”

— Marcel Proust

Time

“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

Wisdom

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

— Marcel Proust

Intelligence

“Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.”

— Marcel Proust

Nature

“A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.”

— Marcel Proust

Communication

“As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.”

— Marcel Proust

Freedom

“Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.”

— Marcel Proust

Art

“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

— Marcel Proust

Friendship

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

— Marcel Proust

Alone

“Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.”

— Marcel Proust

Happiness

“Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.”

— Marcel Proust

Imagination