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Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

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
Giving
Great
Disappointing
Life
Disappointment
Begin
Works
Less
Art
Best

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The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.
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The only possible paradises are those we have lost
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Under each station of the real, another glimmers.
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There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.
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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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It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.
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The time at our disposal each day is elastic the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.
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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.
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There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.
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Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
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As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the Universe had appeared to me more interesting.
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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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Do you suppose that it is within your power to insult me? You evidently are not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?
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But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.
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There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.
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Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.
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To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion
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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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Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only pain we obey.
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We may have revolved every possible idea in our minds, and yet the truth has never occurred to us, and it is from without, when we are least expecting it, that it gives us its cruel stab and wounds us forever.
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