Quotes by Marcel Proust

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

"His hatred of snobs was a derivative of his snobbishness, but made the simpletons (in other words, everyone) believe that he was immune from snobbishness."

"There is nothing like desire for preventing the thing one says from bearing any resemblance to what one has in one's mind."

"As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral."

"All the greatest things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it."

"It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions."

"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."

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

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book."

"Love is a reciprocal torture."

"The only paradise is paradise lost."

"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."

"In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life."

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

"Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages."

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

"In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things."

"We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full."

"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 real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."