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
giving long mind
Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.
flower garden blue
If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones, less an old-fashioned flower garden than a colour garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not entirely nature's, because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will bloom at the same time, harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink.
wall doe length
We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her.
beautiful artist smell
I shall not find a painting more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, though I know of nothing more beautiful than the hawthorn, for I wish to remain sincere and because I know that the beauty of a painting does not depend on the things represented in it. I shall not collect images of hawthorn. I do not venerate hawthorn, I go to see and smell it.
novelists proust century
Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.
adolescence only-time
L'adolescence est le seul temps o u' l'on ait appris quelque chose. Adolescence is the only time when we can learn something.
moral miserable
On devient moral de' s qu'on est malheureux. We become moral once we are miserable.
spares
On ne re c° oit pas la sagesse, il faut la de couvrir soi-me" me, apre' s un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous e pargner. We do not receive wisdom.We must discover it ourselves after experiences which no one else can have for us and from which no one else can spare us.
should-have should should-have-been
I should have been happy: I wasn’t.
art philosophy thinking
We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.
art great-work great-things
All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.
beautiful book language
Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.
wise journey men
Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” - Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us from.
suffering littles might
We scornfully decline, because of one whom we love and who will some day be of so little account, to see another who is of no account to-day, with whom we shall be in love to-morrow, with whom we might, perhaps, had we consented to see her now, have fallen in love a little earlier and who would thus have put a term to our present sufferings, bringing others, it is true, in their place.