Marcel Proust

“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”

“One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.”

“We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.”

“I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own b...”

“... Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth...”

“Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort...”

“When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one ought to say to oneself, “What are her surroundings? What has been her life? All one’s future happiness lies in the answer.”

“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one else can spare us, for our wisdom is the p...”

“... the idea that 'Life' contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.”

“We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say so we represent that hour to ourselves as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time, it never occurs to us that...”

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

“I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it–our life–hides from us, mad...”

“For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits.”

“Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to...”

“... there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again.”

“We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensifi...”

“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 see...”

“The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the s...”

“A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.”

“But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.”