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
truth familiar truest
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
doctors half fool
A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.
lying doctors genius
Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient
thinking people unhappy
People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.
desire belief failing
It is desire that engenders belief; if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end only with out own life.
desire anticipation
Desire makes everything blossom
love real people
The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.
love-is thinking suffering
We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow..
stupid mad serious
As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.
heart opposites type
A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.
book aids found
Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.
reading men literary-merit
A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.
love-is mind desire
There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.
beauty loss world
The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.