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

Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Writing

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

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

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

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

Love is space and time measured by the heart.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Space

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Relationships

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

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: Vision, Attitude, Age, Discovery, Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers

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

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

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

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Promises, Health

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

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
—Marcel Proust
Topics: Mental Illness, Sanity

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

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