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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
Beauty
Pleasure
Happiness
Conversely
Promise
Beginning
Possibility

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We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her.
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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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Even the simple act that we call going to visit a person of our acquaintance is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.
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Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
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People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.
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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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In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted -- atrocious.
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Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.
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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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Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.
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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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People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
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Love is space and time measured by the heart.
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Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.
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We are less justified in saying that the thinking life of humanity is a miraculous perfectioning of animal and physical life than that it is an imperfection in the organization of spiritual life as rudimentary as the communal existence of protozoa in colonies.
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At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.
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And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?
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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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It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.
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What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?
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