Marcel Proust

“The only true paradise is a paradise we have lost.”

“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”

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

“A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.”

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

“My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.”

“If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.”

“Love is a reciprocal torture.”

“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”

“The bonds that unite another person to ourself exist only in our mind.”

“What we call our future is the shadow that our past projects in front of us.”

“Our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.”

“Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see it multiply.”

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

“Leave pretty women to men without imagination.”

“Habit is a second nature that prevents us from knowing the first.”

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

“Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.”

“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”

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