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People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.

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
Persons
Creature
Person
Clever
Feel
Unhappy
Condescend
Feels
Creatures
Comma
Men
Worth
Cholera
Love
Anyone
Bidding
Like
Dies
Astonished
People
Rather
Insignificant

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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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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.
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Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.
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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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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.
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Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
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Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.
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Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years time.
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Certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.
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A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.
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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.
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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 opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
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That translucent alabaster of our memories.
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One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.
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If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
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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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I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.
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A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.
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Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.
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