Marcel Proust

“Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.”

“So rarely do we meet either with easy success or with irreversible defeat.”

“Neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength – we are able in the end to dominate the first and to achieve the second.”

“But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To...”

“The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.”

“Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things hav...”

“Had I been less firmly resolved upon settling down definitively to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four...”

“The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.”

“The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.”

“As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is...”

“Love? I make it often, but I never talk about it.”

“Love is a trap and only reveals itself to us by making us suffer.”

“Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same”

“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.”

“In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want...”

“On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.”

“In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to...”

“No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.”

“A book is no mere book anymore than man can be mere man. A book was like an individual man, unmatched and with no cause of existence beyond himself.”

“[...] to me a new book was not one of a number of similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no cause of existence beyond himself [...]”