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Marcel Proust Quotes

Total quotes: 9
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Tagged: New Eyes, Eyes, Seeing The World New, 107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature, Perfect Sentences
“The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, the one which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way
Tagged: The Secret of Secrecy, Your Foreign Mind
“Thus it is that most of our attempts to translate our innermost feelings do no more than relieve us of them by drawing them out in a blurred form which does not help us to identify them.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)
Tagged: Writing, Bringing Words Across The Universe, Making Sense
“I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
Tagged: Love, Aesthetics, Love as Rebirth, Beauty As Rebirth
“Gaze delightedly at a belt of liquid azure without knowing whether it belongs to the sea or sky.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
Tagged: Azure, Actions towards, Action Towards Reinvigoration, Soothing Language
“Life would have seemed an exquisite thing to me if only I had been free to spend it, hour after hour, with her, to go with her to the stream, to the cow, to the train, to be always at her side, to feel that I was known to her, had my place in her thoughts.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
Tagged: Pastoral, Love, Sublime Beauty
“For a long time I would go to bed early.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way
Tagged: first lines of books
“Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner dark-room the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
Tagged: Memory, Photography
“as soon as he had grasped the fact that I was unhappy he had said to my mother: 'Go and comfort him.' Mamma stayed that night in my room, and it seemed that she did not wish to mar by recrimination those hours which were so different from anything that I had had a right to expect, for when Françoise (who guessed that something extraordinary must have happened when she saw Mamma sitting by my side, holding my hand and letting me cry unchided) said to her: 'But, Madame, what is young master crying for?' she replied: 'Why, Françoise, he doesn't know himself: it's his nerves. Make up the big bed for me quickly and then go off to your own.' And thus for the first time my unhappiness was regarded no longer as a punishable offence but as an involuntary ailment which had been officially recognised, a nervous condition for which I was in no way responsible: I had the consolation of no longer having to mingle apprehensive scruples with the bitterness of my tears; I could weep henceforth without sin. I felt no small degree of pride, either, in Françoise's presence at this return to humane conditions which, not an hour after Mamma had refused to come up to my room and had sent the snubbing message that I was to go to sleep, raised me to the dignity of a grown-up person, brought me of a sudden to a sort of puberty of sorrow, a manumission of tears. I ought”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way
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