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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
Literature
Later
Way
However
Expunge
Things
Lived
Gladly

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The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
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No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
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A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.
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Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
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A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain
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Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
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In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
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We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
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We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
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For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth.
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We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
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The heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.
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Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.
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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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Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.
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People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
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Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.
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Friendship is in the end no more than: . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone.
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When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.
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For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.
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