Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proustwas a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu, published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by many to be one of the greatest authors...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 July 1871
CountryFrance
artist world failing
To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion
morning war men
The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.
decision mind lasts
It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions
august gentleman littles
Do you suppose that it is within your power to insult me? You evidently are not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?
stupidity noses organs
...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.
feet together shadow
Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.
reality nurse littles
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
lying rely-upon done
Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.
feelings different continuing
One cannot change, that is to say become a different person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be.
expression drawing feelings
Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.
book simple personality
None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.
home dark doors
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.
believe thinking focus
To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.
eye people looks
There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.