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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

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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
Self
Eye
Goodness
Odd
Even
Show
Physical
Admiration
Always
Everyone
Sacrifice
Relations
Decried
Love
Makes
Among
Qualities
Arouses
Shows
Least
Sexual
Relatives
Another
Eyes
Details
Nearest
Persons
Quality
Shining
Shines
Person
Moral
Relation
Detail

More quotes by Marcel Proust

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There are optical illusions in time as well as space.
Marcel Proust
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Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.
Marcel Proust
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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.
Marcel Proust
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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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A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.
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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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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
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What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?
Marcel Proust
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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
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In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.
Marcel Proust
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Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.
Marcel Proust
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A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.
Marcel Proust
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It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension whenit, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create.
Marcel Proust
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We are less justified in saying that the thinking life of humanity is a miraculous perfectioning of animal and physical life than that it is an imperfection in the organization of spiritual life as rudimentary as the communal existence of protozoa in colonies.
Marcel Proust
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A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.
Marcel Proust
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We become moral when we are unhappy.
Marcel Proust
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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.
Marcel Proust
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Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.
Marcel Proust
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When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.
Marcel Proust
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...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.
Marcel Proust