1871-1922, French Novelist
A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
Marcel Proust – [Expectation]


A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
Marcel Proust – [Weather]


A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
Marcel Proust – [Ideas]


A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
Marcel Proust – [Infidelity]


A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
Marcel Proust – [Arts and Artists]


All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
Marcel Proust – [Decisions]


Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
Marcel Proust – [Neurosis]


Everything great that we know has come from neurotics? never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor above all what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
Marcel Proust – [Neurosis]


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 – [Doctors]


Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
Marcel Proust – [Happiness]


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 – [Writers and Writing]


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 – [Creativity]


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 – [Dreams]


Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge we make promise only; pain we obey.
Marcel Proust – [Illness]


Impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions
Marcel Proust – [Decisions]


In a separation it is the one who is not really in loved who says the more tender things.
Marcel Proust – [Love Ended]


It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.
Marcel Proust – [Resolution]


It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.
Marcel Proust – [Bed]


Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Marcel Proust – [Happiness]


Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
Marcel Proust – [Men and Women]

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