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...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

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
Life
Another
Melancholy
Order
Hidden
Disposal
Persons
Grown
Orders
Person
Cease
Realise
Live
Lasts
Begun
Feel
Last
Realising
Feels
Future
Earnest
Real
Keep
Obey

More quotes by Marcel Proust

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We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.
Marcel Proust
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The moments of the past do not remain still they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.
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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?
Marcel Proust
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We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.
Marcel Proust
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After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become.
Marcel Proust
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I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they are intelligent as long as they are kind, sincere, etc.
Marcel Proust
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A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.
Marcel Proust
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...Hard people are weak people whom nobody wants, and the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that meekness which the common herd mistake for weakness.
Marcel Proust
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All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.
Marcel Proust
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Let us be grateful to people who make us happy.
Marcel Proust
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Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon.
Marcel Proust
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My dear Madame, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you I just found my cane.
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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I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire.
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No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.
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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.
Marcel Proust
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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.
Marcel Proust
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For a long time I would go to bed early. [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]
Marcel Proust
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The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
Marcel Proust
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Le veritable voyage de decouverte ne consiste pas a chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais a avoir de nouveaux yeux. (The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.)
Marcel Proust