Quote

I blame the newspapers because every day they call our attention to insignificant things, while three or four times in our lives,we read books that contain essential things. Once we feverishly tear the band of paper enclosing our newspapers, things should change and we should find--I do not know--the Pensées by Pascal!

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
Lives
News
Pens
Three
Books
Newspapers
Change
Four
Essential
Enclosing
Find
Call
Essentials
Feverishly
Book
Attention
Blame
Pascal
Every
Knowledge
Tears
Contain
Things
Read
Paper
Insignificant
Times
Band
Tear

More quotes by Marcel Proust

Image
If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.
Marcel Proust
Image
The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.
Marcel Proust
Image
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
Image
When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.
Marcel Proust
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In love, happiness is an abnormal state.
Marcel Proust
Image
What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.
Marcel Proust
Image
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
Image
In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted -- atrocious.
Marcel Proust
Image
Similarly the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant, or their culture broadest, but those who have had the power, ceasing in a moment to live only for themselves, to make use of their personality as of a mirror.
Marcel Proust
Image
No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
Marcel Proust
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Do you suppose that it is within your power to insult me? You evidently are not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?
Marcel Proust
Image
For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.
Marcel Proust
Image
For a long time I would go to bed early. [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]
Marcel Proust
Image
It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.
Marcel Proust
Image
We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
Marcel Proust
Image
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