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.
~ Marcel Proust

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In love, happiness is an abnormal state.
~ Marcel Proust

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Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
~ Marcel Proust

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This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.
~ Marcel Proust

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What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.
~ Marcel Proust

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Fashions, being themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change also.
~ Marcel Proust

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In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.
~ Marcel Proust

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Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.
~ Marcel Proust

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There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.
~ Marcel Proust

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We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
~ Marcel Proust

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