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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.

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
Supposed
Merely
Expression
Teach
Feelings
Indistinct
Form
Relieve
Doe
Expressions
Drawing

More quotes by Marcel Proust

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There is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life. Such grief, felt in such a way is always present, it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again.
Marcel Proust
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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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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
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Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read that I prefer immediately to all the honors.
Marcel Proust
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There are optical illusions in time as well as space.
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Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.
Marcel Proust
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If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.
Marcel Proust
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There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.
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Pour e crire ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand e crivain n'a pas, dans le sens courant, a' l'inventer puisqu'il existe de j a' en chacun de nous, mais a' le traduire. To write the essential book, the only true book, a great writerdoesnot needto invent becausethebook already exists inside each one of us and merely needs translation.
Marcel Proust
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I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.
Marcel Proust
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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
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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.
Marcel Proust
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The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.
Marcel Proust
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We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.
Marcel Proust
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Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.
Marcel Proust
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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.
Marcel Proust
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Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.
Marcel Proust
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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
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For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.
Marcel Proust
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People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
Marcel Proust