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
Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Vice, Virtue
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
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Change, Desire, Desires
All the mind’s activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Reality
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
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
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Intelligence
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
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Disease, Sickness
Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Health, Promises
The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals… is the plagiarism of ourselves.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Plagiarism
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
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
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Risk
A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Weather
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
Love is space and time measured by the heart.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Space
Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.
—Marcel Proust
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
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 fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Habits, Charm, Habit
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Adversity, Suffering, Difficulties
We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond.
—Marcel Proust
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
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Gratitude, Relationships, Gardening, Friendship, Happiness
We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Wisdom, Experience
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
We become moral when we are unhappy.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Morality, Morals
When you really love a writer, what you want is an opinion from them on everything in the world.
—Marcel Proust
Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.
—Marcel Proust
The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: 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
Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Happiness
In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Carpe-diem, Time Management
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: The Past, Past
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Mental Illness, Sanity
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
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: Danger, Dreams
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Imagination
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Ideas, Challenges
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