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
purity chastity confidence-in-others
To the pure all things are pure!
men understanding mind
The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.
passion familiar
It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.
real reality stations
Under each station of the real, another glimmers.
art world form
Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.
grief dust leaving
There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.
reality roles forgotten
Certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.
people regimes difficult
If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.
war men soldier
We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.
views people may
We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own.
history doe has-beens
The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes.
silence ears flutes
There comes in all our lives a time ... when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.
mistake heart eye
Let but a single flash of reality -- the glimpse of a woman from afar or from behind -- enable us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes, and we imagine that we have recognised it, our hearts beat, and we will always remain half-persuaded that it was She, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake.
reality dust magic
Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.