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

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A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.
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A man may have spent his life among the great ones of the earth, who to him have been merely boring relatives or tedious acquaintances because a familiarity engendered in the cradle had stripped them of all glamour in his eyes.
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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.
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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.
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Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.
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La me decine a fait quelques petits progre' s dans ses connaissances depuis Molie' re, mais aucun dans son vocabulaire. Medicine has made a few, small advances in knowledge since Molie' r e, but none in its vocabulary.
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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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Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several.
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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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It's odd how a person always arouses admiration for his moral qualities among the relatives of another with whom he has sexual relations. Physical love, so unjustifiably decried, makes everyone show, down to the least detail, all he has of goodness and self-sacrifice, so that he shines even in the eyes of those nearest to him.
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Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.
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For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
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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.
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Desire makes everything blossom possession makes everything wither and fade.
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We see things but we don't see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another.
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Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
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The only possible paradises are those we have lost
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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.
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The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.
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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?
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