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

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Risk

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

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

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

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Words

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

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Self-Discovery

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

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 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: Experience, Wisdom

It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Difficulties, Adversity

Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals

The only paradise is paradise lost.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Paradise

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Change

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

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Things, Little Things

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

Things don’t change, but by and by our wishes change.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Change

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

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

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Lies, Deception/Lying, Lying

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

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

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

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Challenges, Ideas

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

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

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

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Weather

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