A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
Marcel Proust

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.
Marcel Proust

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

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

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

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.
Marcel Proust

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Marcel Proust

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

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.
Marcel Proust

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
Marcel Proust


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

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

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.
Marcel Proust

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

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

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.
Marcel Proust

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

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.
Marcel Proust

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
Marcel Proust

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Marcel Proust