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Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.

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
Flotsam
Shipwrecked
Masterpieces
Masterpiece
Minds
Great
Mind

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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.
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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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Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
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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.
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If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.
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The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
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We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.
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I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop the potion is losing its magic.
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The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.
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The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgment, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life-and therefore we judge it disparagingly.
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Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.
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Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient
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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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Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years time.
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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.
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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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L'ide e qu'on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l'ide e qu'un autre est mort. The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.
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A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.
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At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.
Marcel Proust