Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it...
In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.
How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.
Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.
Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.
We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
The one thing more difficult than following a regime is keeping from imposing it on others.
For a long time I would go to bed early. [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]
The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage.
What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.
Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.
A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
When I went to Venice I found that my dream had become-incredibly, but quite simply-my address.
After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become.
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.
An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.
So long as I know what's boiling in my pot I don't bother my head about what's in other people's.
Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.
The true voyage of discovery is not a journey to a new place; it is learning to see with new eyes.
Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.
Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.
They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.
Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.
Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.
The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.
Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.
A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.
We see things but we don't see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another.
The courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the "other side.
The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.
Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors.
A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.
The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.
The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.
To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.
Laissons les jolies femmes aux hommes sans imagination. Leave the pretty women for the men without imagination.