Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Marcel Proust Novelist

  • Gender: Male
  • Citizenship: France
  • Born: Jul 10, 1871
  • Died: Nov 18, 1922

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu, published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by many to be one of the greatest authors of all time.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only pain we obey.

The time at our disposal each day is elastic the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.

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

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.