Just as priests, who have the greatest experience of the heart, can best forgive sins which they do not themselves commit; so the genius, who has the broadest intellectual experience, can best understand ideas which differ most from those which form the basis of his own works.
Marcel Proust
Love is an incurable malady like those diatheses in which rheumatism lets up only to make way for chronic headaches.
Marcel Proust
A clear view of certain inferiorities in no way diminishes affection; on the contrary, love makes us consider them charming.
Marcel Proust
To everything more or less British, the French give an English name, just not the one that is used in England.
Marcel Proust
Aesthetically, the number of human types is so limited that wherever one goes one often has the joy of seeing people who resemble friends. And a kind of magnetic influence draws together and binds inseparably certain physical and mental traits so that when nature thus introduces a person into a new body it does not mutilate the personality noticeably.
Marcel Proust
Each one of us has his own way of being betrayed in love just as each of us has his own way of catching a cold.
Marcel Proust
We get engaged by proxy and then think ourselves obliged to marry the person who has been substituted for our beloved.
Marcel Proust
Of all the means by which love is produced, of all its agents of dissemination, one of the most efficacious is that great wave of anxiety which sometimes passes over us. At such times the die is cast: we shall love the person whose company pleases us at that time. It is not even necessary that up to then we should have liked her more than or even as much as others. What is necessary is that our taste for her should become exclusive.
Marcel Proust
When a piece of sculpture or a musical composition produces an emotion that one feels to be higher, purer, truer than ordinary life, such a work must correspond to a certain spiritual reality.
Marcel Proust
Doubtless to every man the life of any other individual reaches out into obscurity down unsuspected paths.
Marcel Proust
