Quote

Friendship is in the end no more than: . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone.

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
Seeks
Friendship
Alone
Lying
Ends
Believe
Make

More quotes by Marcel Proust

Image
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
Marcel Proust
Image
There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.
Marcel Proust
Image
A man may have spent his life among the great ones of the earth, who to him have been merely boring relatives or tedious acquaintances because a familiarity engendered in the cradle had stripped them of all glamour in his eyes.
Marcel Proust
Image
A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.
Marcel Proust
Image
It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.
Marcel Proust
Image
It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.
Marcel Proust
Image
After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.
Marcel Proust
Image
... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does and it isonly when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely.
Marcel Proust
Image
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
Image
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.
Marcel Proust
Image
The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.
Marcel Proust
Image
But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.
Marcel Proust
Image
... 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
Image
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
Marcel Proust
Image
A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal but their ranks can be mingled or broken.
Marcel Proust
Image
Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.
Marcel Proust
Image
Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.
Marcel Proust
Image
Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
Marcel Proust
Image
Love is space and time measured by the heart.
Marcel Proust
Image
It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.
Marcel Proust