Quotes · Skopia

17 quotes

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.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1913

★ 1.1

Novel · Modernist literature

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 1.2

Novel · Modernist literature

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realise how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1921

★ 1.9

Novel · Modernist literature

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

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 2.1

Novel · Modernist literature

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 2.2

Novel · Modernist literature

Love... Is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 2.2

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

Marcel Proust

1922

★ 3.5

Novel · Modernist literature

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

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 3.6

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

Marcel Proust

1896

★ 3.7

Novel · Modernist literature

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 3.7

Novel · Modernist literature

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

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1919

★ 3.8

Novel · Modernist literature

There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 4.5

Novel · Modernist literature

Once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me... Immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1913

★ 5.3

Novel · Modernist literature

Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1921

★ 5.3

Novel · Modernist literature

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 5.5

Novel · Modernist literature

The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 6.1

Novel · Modernist literature

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 7.0

Sourced and curated.