Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (1871–1922,) known simply as Marcel Proust, was a French novelist, critic, and essayist. He is considered one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.
Proust is best known for his enormous novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, named earlier as Remembrance of Things Past,) published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. In Search of Lost Time is Proust’s own life story told as a symbolic quest for truth, but his confessions are controlled in the elaborately shaped imagination of the author.
At its core, À la recherche du temps perdu explores how time can be recovered and how the past, aided by involuntary memory, can be retained and preserved as art. This masterpiece of 20th-century literature is 3,200 pages long in the original French version and 4000 pages in the Modern Library’s English translation. Proust was proofreading and copyediting the final three uncompleted volumes on his deathbed in 1922. When he died of pneumonia, he was reworking a death scene he’d written earlier.
Born in suburban Paris to an affluent Catholic father who was a doctor and a Jewish mother, Proust overcame acute asthma to complete a baccalaureate degree and a year of military service. Proust’s literary genius became evident during his high school years. He began to patronize such prominent Parisian salons as that of Madame Arman, a friend of the poet Anatole France. Under the patronage of the latter, Proust published his first book, a collection of prose poems and novellas titled Les Plaisirs et les Jours (Pleasures and Days, 1896.) It was not very successful.
After years of less-successful writing, during the summer of 1909, Proust developed an essay titled Contre Sainte-Beuve (On Art and Literature) into a novel, which he would continue to write for the rest of his life. In 1913, he adopted for this novel the title Á la recherche du temps perdu. In his lifetime, those who observed its brilliance and those who claimed it was unreadable debated the merit of Proust’s immense novel. Today, it is recognized as one of the foremost literary works of the Western canon.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Marcel Proust
What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Things, Little Things
The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals… is the plagiarism of ourselves.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Plagiarism
Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Deception/Lying, Lying, Lies
There’s nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one’s mind.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Desires, Desire
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.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Love
A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Gratitude, Happiness, Relationships, Gardening, Friendship
All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Decisions, Decision, Change
It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one’s bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one’s head under the cover, giving one’s self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Sleep
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Charm, Habit, Habits
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Imagination
A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
—Marcel Proust
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.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Doctors
It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Self-Discovery
The “sensitiveness” claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Mental Illness
The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Past, The Past
We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill the gap.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Life
It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Cancer, The Body, Body
The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Women
We become moral when we are unhappy.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Morality, Morals
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Adversity, Difficulties, Suffering
Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Women, Men, Men & Women
The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Opinions
People have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Aspirations, Pleasure, Goals
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.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Regret
A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Weather
Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Adversity, Honor
It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.
—Marcel Proust
No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Vice, Virtue
The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.
—Marcel Proust
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