Quotations by Author



Marcel Proust



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


Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.


Love is space and time measured by the heart.


Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.


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.


Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.


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


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


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.


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


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


Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.


Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.


We become moral when we are unhappy.


Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.