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There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

Marcel Proust

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Marcel Proust
Age: 51 †
Born: 1871
Born: July 10
Died: 1922
Died: November 18
Author
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
Paris
France
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
Proust
Valentin-Louis-Georgs-Eugène-Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugéne Marcel Proust
Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugéne-Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugene Marcel Proust
Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugene-Marcel Proust
Bernard d'Algouvres
Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugène-Marcel Proust
Would
Youth
Unpleasant
Men
Consciousness
Period
Life
Memories
Memory
Wise
Regret
Wisdom
Periods
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Later
Way
However
Expunge
Things
Lived
Gladly

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The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
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The only possible paradises are those we have lost
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Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
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When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.
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In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.
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The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage.
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But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.
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We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.
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The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.
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I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence.
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Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
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We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.
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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.
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I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire.
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Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
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The true voyage of discovery is not a journey to a new place it is learning to see with new eyes.
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We are less justified in saying that the thinking life of humanity is a miraculous perfectioning of animal and physical life than that it is an imperfection in the organization of spiritual life as rudimentary as the communal existence of protozoa in colonies.
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That translucent alabaster of our memories.
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They like my books better in England than in France a translation would be very successful there.
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For a long time I would go to bed early. [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]
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