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
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Dreams, Danger
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
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
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Mental Illness
Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Happiness
If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.
—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
When you really love a writer, what you want is an opinion from them on everything in the world.
—Marcel Proust
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Gardening, Happiness, Friendship, Gratitude, Relationships
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: Perspective, Vision, Discovery, Age, Attitude
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Desires, Change, Desire
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: Dying, Death
People have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Pleasure, Goals, Aspirations
Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Honor, Adversity
Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.
—Marcel Proust
Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.
—Marcel Proust
All the mind’s activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Reality
It is seldom indeed that one parts on good terms, because if one were on good terms one would not part.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Perspective
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.
—Marcel Proust
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
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
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Imagination
It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Self-Discovery
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