Marcel Proust / 1871–1922 / France / Literary Critic, Novelist
Note: All quotations are taken from À la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time], published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927.
Adultery
Adultery introduces spirit into the dead letter of marriage.
Vol. 5: La Prisonnière [The Prisoner] (1923).
Art
Less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.
Vol. 2: À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur [In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower] (1919).
What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.
Vol. 2: À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur [In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower] (1919).
By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and we have as many worlds at our disposal as there are original artists, more different from each other than those which revolve in infinity and which still send us their distinctive ray many centuries after the hearth—be it Rembrandt’s or Vermeer’s—from which it emanated was extinguished.
Vol. 7: Le temps retrouvé [Time Recovered] (1927).
Body and Spirit
Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the spirit.
Vol. 7: Le temps retrouvé [Time Recovered] (1927).
Cruelty
Perhaps she would not have thought that evil was a state so rare, so extraordinary, so disorienting, to which it was so restful to emigrate, if she had been able to discern in herself, as in everyone else, that indifference to the sufferings we cause and which, whatever other names we give to it, is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.
Vol. 1: Du côté de chez Swann [Swann’s Way] (1913).
Decisions
We always make definitive decisions because of a state of mind that is not destined to last.
Vol. 2: À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur [In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower] (1919).
Faces
The features of our face are scarcely more than gestures become fixed by habit.
Vol. 2: À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur [In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower] (1919).
Illness
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed. To kindness, to knowledge, we make promises only; pain, we obey.
Vol. 4: Sodome et Gomorrhe [Sodom and Gomorrah] (1922).
Life
We want passionately for there to be another life, in which we would be the same as we are here below. But we do not reflect that, even without waiting for this other life, in this life itself, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we used to be, to the way we wanted to stay forever.
Vol. 4: Sodome et Gomorrhe [Sodom and Gomorrah] (1922).
The only true voyage, the only Fountain of Youth, would be not to travel toward new landscapes, but to have fresh eyes, to see the universe with the eyes of another person, of a hundred other people, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them constitutes.
Vol. 5: La Prisonnière [The Prisoner] (1923).
The bonds between another human being and ourselves exist only in our thought. Memory, as it grows weaker, lets go of them . . . Man is the being who cannot emerge out of himself, who knows others only in himself, and who, when he denies this, lies.
Vol. 6: Albertine disparue [Albertine Gone] (1925).
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.
Vol. 6: Albertine disparue [Albertine Gone] (1925).
Love
Earlier, we dream of possessing the heart of the woman we love; later, the feeling that we possess the heart of a woman may be enough to make us fall in love.
Vol. 1: Du côté de chez Swann [Swann’s Way] (1913).
In love, happiness is an abnormal state.
Vol. 2: À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur [In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower] (1919).
Like everyone not in love, he imagined that we choose the person we love after endless deliberations and on the basis of various qualities and conventions.
Vol. 4: Sodome et Gomorrhe [Sodom and Gomorrah] (1922).
Love is space and time rendered perceptible to the heart.
Vol. 5: La Prisonnière [The Prisoner] (1923).
There is not one single woman whose possession is as precious to us as that of the truths she reveals to us in making us suffer.
Vol. 6: Albertine disparue [Albertine Gone] (1925).
Memory
As soon as I recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine dunked in linden tea that my aunt gave to me (although I did not yet know and had to wait until much later to discover why this memory made me so happy), immediately the old gray house on the street, where her bedroom was located, came to me like a stage set.
Vol. 1: Du côté de chez Swann [Swann’s Way] (1913).
The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
Vol. 1: Du côté de chez Swann [Swann’s Way] (1913).
Neurotics
Everything we recognize as great comes to us from neurotics. They, and they alone, have founded religions and composed masterpieces.
Vol. 3: Du côté de Guermantes [The Guermantes Way] (1920).
Personality
. . . our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.
Vol. 1: Du côté de chez Swann [Swann’s Way] (1913).
Pleasure
It is not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, which seemed to her attractive; it is pleasure that seemed evil.
Vol. 1: Du côté de chez Swann [Swann’s Way] (1913).
Suffering
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
Vol. 6: Albertine disparue [Albertine Gone] (1925).
Time
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic. The passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills up what remains.
Vol. 2: À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur [In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower] (1919).
Virtue
Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we make it our duty to practice them, that, if we are suddenly called upon to perform some action of a different order, it takes us by surprise, and without our supposing for a moment that it might involve the bringing of those very same virtues into play.
Vol. 2: À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur [In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower] (1919).
Wisdom
We are not given wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
Vol. 2: À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur [In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower] (1919).