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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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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Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
~ 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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A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.
~ 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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Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
~ Marcel Proust

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

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The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.
~ Marcel Proust

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