Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.
Marcel Proust
Image
Daughters of the attitude that produced them, certain women will not appeal to us without the double bed in which we find peace by their side, while others, to be caressed with a more secret intention, require leaves blown by the wind, water rippling in the dark, things as light and fleeting as they are.
Marcel Proust
Image
To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion
Marcel Proust
Image
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.
Marcel Proust
Image
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
Image
If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.
Marcel Proust
Image
We become moral when we are unhappy.
Marcel Proust
Image
Pour e crire ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand e crivain n'a pas, dans le sens courant, a' l'inventer puisqu'il existe de j a' en chacun de nous, mais a' le traduire. To write the essential book, the only true book, a great writerdoesnot needto invent becausethebook already exists inside each one of us and merely needs translation.
Marcel Proust
Image
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
Marcel Proust
Image
Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.
Marcel Proust
Image
For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
Marcel Proust
Image
One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.
Marcel Proust
Image
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.
Marcel Proust
Image
Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.
Marcel Proust
Image
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
Marcel Proust
Image
There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.
Marcel Proust
Image
We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that's the only happy solution we can see. We don't think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
Marcel Proust
Image
Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read that I prefer immediately to all the honors.
Marcel Proust
Image
How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?
Marcel Proust
Image
I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop the potion is losing its magic.
Marcel Proust