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It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.

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
Tragedy
Merely
Mind
People
Showcases
Perishable
Showcase
Collections

More quotes by Marcel Proust

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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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The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
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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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We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.
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One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.
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If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.
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La possession de ce qu'on aime est une joie plus grande encore que l'amour. Possessing what one loves is an even greater joy than love itself.
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Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.
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But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.
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After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.
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Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.
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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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We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.
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Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.
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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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...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.
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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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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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Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
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It's odd how a person always arouses admiration for his moral qualities among the relatives of another with whom he has sexual relations. Physical love, so unjustifiably decried, makes everyone show, down to the least detail, all he has of goodness and self-sacrifice, so that he shines even in the eyes of those nearest to him.
Marcel Proust