Quote

We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.

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
Happiness
Occasions
Lives
Interests
Intensification
Stills
Grief
Alongside
Doe
Foundation
Foundations
Still
Exist
Uncommon
Single
Numerous
Suffering
Occasion
Interest
Laid

More quotes by Marcel Proust

Image
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.
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
I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they are intelligent as long as they are kind, sincere, etc.
Marcel Proust
Image
To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.
Marcel Proust
Image
Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.
Marcel Proust
Image
We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.
Marcel Proust
Image
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.
Marcel Proust
Image
There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.
Marcel Proust
Image
...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.
Marcel Proust
Image
The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.
Marcel Proust
Image
That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour but that which we have forgotten having said, or even what we never said, will cause laughter even into the next world.
Marcel Proust
Image
How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?
Marcel Proust
Image
Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.
Marcel Proust
Image
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.
Marcel Proust
Image
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy.
Marcel Proust
Image
People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.
Marcel Proust
Image
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.
Marcel Proust
Image
It's odd how a person always arouses admiration for his moral qualities among the relatives of another with whom he has sexual relations. Physical love, so unjustifiably decried, makes everyone show, down to the least detail, all he has of goodness and self-sacrifice, so that he shines even in the eyes of those nearest to him.
Marcel Proust
Image
She was a woman of uncertain age.
Marcel Proust
Image
Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.
Marcel Proust