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... 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

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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
Reading
Suffer
Great
Suffering
Chosen
Much
Happy
Loving
Made
Less
Kindness
Love
Woman
Intelligence
Writer
Strictly
Cannot
Stop
Hostility
Find
Books
Speaking
Book

More quotes by Marcel Proust

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Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.
Marcel Proust
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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
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Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.
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It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.
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Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.
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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.
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There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
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Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.
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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.
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Lies are essential to humanity.
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Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
Marcel Proust
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But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.
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The moments of the past do not remain still they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.
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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
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For neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength--we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second.
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The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage.
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Certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.
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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.
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The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
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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