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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.

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
Instead
Imagination
Imagine
Makes
Worthless
Giving
Hardly
Trying
Suppose
Something
Discover
Life
Gives

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No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.
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... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.
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It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.
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The truth has no need to be uttered to be made apparent, and ... one may perhaps gather it with more certainty, without waiting for words and without even taking any account of them, from countless outward signs, even from certain invisible phenomena, analogous in the sphere of human character to what atmospheric changes are in the physical world.
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The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.
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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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The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.
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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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Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.
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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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It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension whenit, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create.
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It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.
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Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.
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We become moral when we are unhappy.
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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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In love, happiness is an abnormal state.
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Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.
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Similarly the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant, or their culture broadest, but those who have had the power, ceasing in a moment to live only for themselves, to make use of their personality as of a mirror.
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We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
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It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.
Marcel Proust