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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.

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
Saying
Colonies
Humanity
Communal
Animal
Colony
Existence
Imperfection
Less
Miraculous
Spiritual
Justified
Mind
Organization
Thinking
Physical
Rudimentary

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Laissons les jolies femmes aux hommes sans imagination. Leave the pretty women for the men without imagination.
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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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Love is a reciprocal torture.
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The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
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There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
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I blame the newspapers because every day they call our attention to insignificant things, while three or four times in our lives,we read books that contain essential things. Once we feverishly tear the band of paper enclosing our newspapers, things should change and we should find--I do not know--the Pensées by Pascal!
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Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.
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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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Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.
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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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The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.
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We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.
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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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For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.
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Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.
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We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
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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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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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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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Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.
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