Marcel Proust

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

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.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

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.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

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

We become moral when we are unhappy.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.