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I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.
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
Women
Unknown
Enough
Generally
Dispel
Trying
Roots
Extract
Long
Mere
Introduction
Mystery
Square
Since
Squares
Woman
Quantity
Given
Root
More quotes by Marcel Proust
Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.
Marcel Proust
And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.
Marcel Proust
Laissons les jolies femmes aux hommes sans imagination. Leave the pretty women for the men without imagination.
Marcel Proust
Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her.
Marcel Proust
It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.
Marcel Proust
I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.
Marcel Proust
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.
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
Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.
Marcel Proust
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
We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
Marcel Proust
Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.
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
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
There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.
Marcel Proust
We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.
Marcel Proust
A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.
Marcel Proust
On ne re c° oit pas la sagesse, il faut la de couvrir soi-me me, apre' s un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous e pargner. We do not receive wisdom.We must discover it ourselves after experiences which no one else can have for us and from which no one else can spare us.
Marcel Proust
If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.
Marcel Proust
... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does and it isonly when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely.
Marcel Proust
