Quote

Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.

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
Half
Tables
Knife
House
Realized
Shells
Left
Empty
Beside
Tablecloth
Around
Saws
Knives
Awry
Much
Painting
Corner
Oyster
Never
Parents
Corners
Cleared
Parent
Table
Oysters
Beauty
Lays
Shell

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We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
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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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No man is a complete mystery except to himself.
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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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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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It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension whenit, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create.
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A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.
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The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgment, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life-and therefore we judge it disparagingly.
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I should have been happy: I wasn’t.
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All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.
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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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According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.
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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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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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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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For a long time I would go to bed early. [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]
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A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.
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We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
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Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.
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We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.
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