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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.
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
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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
Book
Merely
Without
Reader
Work
Perhaps
Every
Writer
Optical
Kind
Seen
Discern
Never
Possible
Instrument
Would
Reading
Finds
Makes
Instruments
More quotes by Marcel Proust
Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.
Marcel Proust
Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
Marcel Proust
Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.
Marcel Proust
My dear Madame, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you I just found my cane.
Marcel Proust
According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.
Marcel Proust
We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.
Marcel Proust
The moments of the past do not remain still they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.
Marcel Proust
The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.
Marcel Proust
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
Marcel Proust
Do you suppose that it is within your power to insult me? You evidently are not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?
Marcel Proust
A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal but their ranks can be mingled or broken.
Marcel Proust
We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her.
Marcel Proust
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
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
Marcel Proust
The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.
Marcel Proust
The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.
Marcel Proust
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.
Marcel Proust
The courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the other side.
Marcel Proust
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.
Marcel Proust
Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.
Marcel Proust