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The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.

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
Merely
Remains
Present
Past
Fugitive

More quotes by Marcel Proust

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I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.
Marcel Proust
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Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.
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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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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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Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises 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.
Marcel Proust
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No man is a complete mystery except to himself.
Marcel Proust
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When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.
Marcel Proust
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In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.
Marcel Proust
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Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
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There is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life. Such grief, felt in such a way is always present, it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again.
Marcel Proust
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What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.
Marcel Proust
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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.
Marcel Proust
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One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.
Marcel Proust
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Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.
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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.
Marcel Proust
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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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In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted -- atrocious.
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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.
Marcel Proust
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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?
Marcel Proust