Marcel Proust

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

“Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.”

“It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.”

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

“A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.”

“Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.”

“A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.”

“As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.”

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

“Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.”

“Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.”

“Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.”

“Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only pain we obey.”

“Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.”

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

“The time at our disposal each day is elastic the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.”

“Love is space and time measured by the heart.”

“Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.”

“We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.”

“We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”

“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.”