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We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

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
Ideas
Complete
Outline
Mind
Picture
Compose
Minds
Outlines
Physical
Pack
Creatures
Packs
Certainly
Formed
Already
Principal
Place
Creature

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We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own.
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If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.
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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.
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No man is a complete mystery except to himself.
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Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.
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The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
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We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
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For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth.
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Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands, but at leastin our thoughts where we may dispose of them at our whim, which gives us the illusion of power over them.
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The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
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For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it.
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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.
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The heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.
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The truth has no need to be uttered to be made apparent, and ... one may perhaps gather it with more certainty, without waiting for words and without even taking any account of them, from countless outward signs, even from certain invisible phenomena, analogous in the sphere of human character to what atmospheric changes are in the physical world.
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People who laugh so heartily at what they themselves have said, when it is not funny, dispense us accordingly, by taking upon themselves the responsibility for the mirth, from joining in it.
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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.
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Under each station of the real, another glimmers.
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When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.
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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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No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.
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