Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (July 10, 1871 - November 18, 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). He is considered by many to be one of the greatest authors of all time. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.
Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
Love is a reciprocal torture.
Love is space and time measured by the heart.
The only paradise is paradise lost.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity.
The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.
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.
Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
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(November 18 is also the birthday of Clarence Day )
Categories: Marcel Proust, Quotes of the day
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