The quotations of

Marcel Proust

French novelist, critic and essayist

1871–1922

43 quotes, most often on Love, Women and Happiness.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
- Time
- Truth & Lies
In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
- Love
Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol. VII: The Past Recaptured (1927), Ch. III: “An Afternoon Party at the House of the Princesse de Guermantes”
- Happiness
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol. IV: Cities of the Plain (1921-1922), Pt. II, Ch. 1
In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.
Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol I: Swann’s Way (1913), “Swann in Love”
People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.
- Love
What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.
- Love
- Women
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
- Risk
Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
- Truth & Lies
The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.
- Women
The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.
- Time
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.
The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome.
- Health
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.
The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been ‘great changes.’
- Change

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