The quotations of

Marcel Proust

French novelist, critic and essayist

1871–1922

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

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
- Happiness
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
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
- Thinking
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
- Children
- Reading
As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral.
- Happiness
- Morality
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
- Clever Jabs
- Talking
Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into account.
- Thinking
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
- Reading
- Writing
It is seldom indeed that one parts on good terms, because if one were on good terms, one would not part.
We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond.
- Success
We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
- Wisdom
I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
- Writing
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.
- Health
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
- Time
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills up what remains.
Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol II: Within a Budding Grove (1919), Ch. I: “Madame Swann at Home”
- Time
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Most quoted

People A to Z

C. S. Lewis1898–1963151 quotes

Mark Twain1835–1910151 quotes

Benjamin Franklin1706–179098 quotes

Martin Luther King Jr.1929–196884 quotes

Albert Einstein1879–195595 quotes

Dave Barryborn 1947100 quotes