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Marcel Proust Biography

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (/pruːst/; French: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922), known as Marcel Proust, was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier rendered as Remembrance of Things Past), published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.

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Marcel Proust Quotes

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

Absurdity, Direct, Habit, Proportion

The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes.

Change, Changes, Doe, Great Change, History, Time

Love is a reciprocal torture.

Literature, Love, Reciprocal, Torture

We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that's the only happy solution we can see. We don't think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution; things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

Believe, Change, Perspective, See, Thinking, Wishes

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

Essence, Faithful, Past, Recollection, Smell, Unsubstantial

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Alabaster, Memories, Our Memories, Translucent

One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.

Interesting, Oneself, Opportunity, Thinking, Thinks

In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we donot know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.

Love, Ideas, Sound, Place, Transparence, Deceive

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.

Desire, Future, Love, Mind, Peace, Secured

Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it. . . There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline. . . reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the Spirit.

Depression, Discipline, Introduce, Reading, Sort, Spiritual

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

Chemical, Drug, Hands, Like, Memories

. . . the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

Nose, Noses, Organ, Organs, Stupidity

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

Cruelties, Enchantment, Enchantments, Firsts, Knowing, Nature

The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

Duty, Interpreter, Tasks, Writer

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.

Distinct, Doubt, Names, Nature, People, Same

There is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently--without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.

Attitude, Disguised, Night, Probably, Tolerance, Vices

. . . 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.

Happy, Kindness, Love, Loving

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

Everything, Literature, Lying, Passes, Spoken, Time

The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.

Most Powerful, Powerful, Sleep, Soporific

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

Dead, Dying, Grows, Literature, People

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