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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
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
Never
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Would
Reading
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Makes
Instruments
Book
Merely
Without
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Seen
Discern
More quotes by Marcel Proust
It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.
Marcel Proust
May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend and then, even when the time comes, as it has come for me now, when the woods are black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I do, by looking up at the sky.
Marcel Proust
The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.
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
They like my books better in England than in France a translation would be very successful there.
Marcel Proust
Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.
Marcel Proust
But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.
Marcel Proust
After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become.
Marcel Proust
That translucent alabaster of our memories.
Marcel Proust
Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.
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
Desire makes everything blossom possession makes everything wither and fade.
Marcel Proust
For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it.
Marcel Proust
It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.
Marcel Proust
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.
Marcel Proust
How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?
Marcel Proust
Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises pain we obey.
Marcel Proust
The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
Marcel Proust
The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.
Marcel Proust
We may have revolved every possible idea in our minds, and yet the truth has never occurred to us, and it is from without, when we are least expecting it, that it gives us its cruel stab and wounds us forever.
Marcel Proust