Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Marcel Proust (French Novelist)

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

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Desire, Desires, Change

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

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Intelligence

Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient?
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Mental Illness

We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond.
—Marcel Proust

When you really love a writer, what you want is an opinion from them on everything in the world.
—Marcel Proust

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
—Marcel Proust

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Men, Women, Men & Women

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

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Love

Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Grief

That translucent alabaster of our memories.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Memory

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.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Memory

We become moral when we are unhappy.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Morality, Morals

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Face, Faces

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Habit, Charm, Habits

The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Doctors

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 realize how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Greatness & Great Things

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
Topics: Art

It is desire that engenders belief; if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end only with out own life.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Beliefs

The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Women

I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Creativity

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

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Love

Let us leave the beautiful women to men with no imagination.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Women

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: Desire, Desires

The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals… is the plagiarism of ourselves.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Plagiarism

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of hundreds of others, in seeing the hundreds of universes that each of them sees.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Discovery, Vision, Attitude, Age, Perspective

Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.
—Marcel Proust

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Suffering, Difficulties, Adversity

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