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Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business. Henry David Thoreau		Thursday Oct 16, 2025
		Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969

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What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art. Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

Quote Author: Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (French pronounced [maʁsɛl pʁust]) (July 10, 1871 - November 18, 1922) was a French novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of À la recherche du temps perdu (in English, In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past), a monumental work of twentieth-century fiction published in seven parts from 1913 to 1927.

Other Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust Quotes

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.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.

Cannot come, lie follows.

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

The true paradises are paradises we have lost.

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

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us around it, led us past it, and then if we turn around to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

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

The bonds that unite another person to ourself exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them.

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

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

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

I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.

If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones, less an oldfashioned flower garden than a colour garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not entirely nature's, because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will bloom at the same time, harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink.

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

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.

When, from a long distant past, nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised for a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering ... the vast structure of recollection.

But this does not exempt the sane from a feeling of alarm when a madman who has composed a sublime poem, after explaining to them in the most logical fashion that he has been shut up by mistake through his wife's machinations, imploring them to intercede for him with the governor of the asylum, complaining of the promiscuous company that is forced upon him, concludes as follows: 'You see that man in the courtyard, who I'm obliged to put up with; he thinks he's Jesus Christ. That should give you an idea of the sort of lunatics I've been shut up with: he can't be Jesus Christ, because I'm Jesus Christ!' A moment earlier, you were on the point of going to assure the psychiatrist that a mistake had been made. On hearing these words, even if you bear in mind the admirable poem at which this same man is working every day, you shrink from him....

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.

Though time changes people, it does not alter the image we have kept of them.

The only true voyage of discovery is not to go to new places, but to have other eyes.

We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorous and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent and intimate hours.

Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu'on a perdus. The true paradises are the lost paradises.

There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

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