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It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

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
Promise
Beginning
Possibility
Beauty
Pleasure
Happiness
Conversely

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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.
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Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
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The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
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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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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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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.
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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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Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.
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I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop the potion is losing its magic.
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The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.
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There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.
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No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
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We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.
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When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.
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Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.
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Love is a reciprocal torture.
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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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We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
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That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour but that which we have forgotten having said, or even what we never said, will cause laughter even into the next world.
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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.
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