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We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.
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
Giving
Features
Time
Drawing
Life
Strive
Like
Identity
Form
Give
Nilly
Persons
Willy
Person
Copying
More quotes by Marcel Proust
Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.
Marcel Proust
Under each station of the real, another glimmers.
Marcel Proust
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.
Marcel Proust
For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it.
Marcel Proust
Desire makes everything blossom
Marcel Proust
... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.
Marcel Proust
We see things but we don't see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another.
Marcel Proust
Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.
Marcel Proust
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.
Marcel Proust
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
Marcel Proust
Friendship is in the end no more than: . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone.
Marcel Proust
An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. If only, she wrote, you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.
Marcel Proust
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
Marcel Proust
People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.
Marcel Proust
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.
Marcel Proust
Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.
Marcel Proust
We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.
Marcel Proust
All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.
Marcel Proust
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.
Marcel Proust
A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.
Marcel Proust