Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
Marcel Proust

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
Marcel Proust

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.
Marcel Proust

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
Marcel Proust

Love is a reciprocal torture.
Marcel Proust

Love is space and time measured by the heart.
Marcel Proust

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
Marcel Proust

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
Marcel Proust

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.
Marcel Proust

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.
Marcel Proust

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
Marcel Proust

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

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.
Marcel Proust

The only paradise is paradise lost.
Marcel Proust

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.
Marcel Proust

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust

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.
Marcel Proust

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.
Marcel Proust