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
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Youth, Childhood
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Imagination
Love is space and time measured by the heart.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Space
Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Memory
Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Honor, Adversity
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
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Happiness, Gratitude, Relationships, Friendship, Gardening
It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Self-Discovery
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Mental Illness, Sanity
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
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
We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Death, Dying
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
I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
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 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: Attitude, Age, Discovery, Vision, Perspective
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Lies, Deception/Lying, Lying
And with the old, intermittent caddishness which reappeared in him when he was no longer unhappy and his moral standards dropped accordingly, he exclaimed to himself: “To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type.
—Marcel Proust
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Death
A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists
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
We become moral when we are unhappy.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Morals, Morality
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Risk
If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.
—Marcel Proust
A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Weather
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
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Challenges, Ideas
All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Decision, Decisions, Change
Let us leave the beautiful women to men with no imagination.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Women
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
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