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

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We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.
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For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.
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Le style, pour l'e crivain aussi bien que pour le peintre, est une question non de technique mais de vision. For the writer as well as for the painter, style is not a question of technique, but of vision.
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They like my books better in England than in France a translation would be very successful there.
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The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.
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Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.
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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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Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.
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Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.
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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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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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Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.
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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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In love, happiness is an abnormal state.
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One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.
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Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
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A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain
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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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There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.
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Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.
Marcel Proust