Article image

17 Beautiful Observations From Marcel Proust

In 1909 at age 38, Marcel Proust began writing In Search of Lost Time, and he would continue writing his monumental work until his death a century ago in 1922. In total, In Search of Lost Time spanned seven volumes containing around 3,200 pages and more than 2,000 characters.

Despite initial reticence from publishers, Proust’s masterpiece went on to become one of the defining works in modern literature. Critics and authors alike were quick to praise his style and substance. Virginia Woolf was a huge fan, writing in 1922, “Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that!”

Like Woolf, Proust helped shape modernist literature. His work often rejected chronological and narrative continuity, and his themes of time, memory, and the nature of art were very much at the heart of modernism. Memory, perhaps more than any other theme, is central to In Search of Lost Time. In the famous madeleine scene in the first volume, Swann’s Way, Proust writes how the smell and taste of a little cake floods the mind of his narrator with involuntary memories of his aunt Léonie and associated recollections.

Proust left us with an incredible body of work, in which he comments and philosophizes quite beautifully on many topics. Here are 17 of his greatest quotes, covering everything from love and writing to time, memory, and the nature of reality itself.

Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

Share Quote

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

Share Quote

The only true voyage of discovery … would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

Share Quote

The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience.

Share Quote

When we come to examine the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, the world's first natural philosophers, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown.

Share Quote

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.

Share Quote

What matters in life is not whom or what one loves, it is the fact of loving.

Share Quote

Nine-tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.

Share Quote

I realized that the essential book, the one true book, is one that the great writer does not need to invent, in the current sense of the word, since it already exists in every one of us — he has only to translate it. The task and the duty of a writer are those of a translator.

Share Quote

Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.

Share Quote

There are perhaps no days of our childhood that we lived as fully as the days we think we left behind without living at all: the days we spent with a favorite book.

Share Quote

Love is space and time rendered perceptible by the heart.

Share Quote

The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.

Share Quote

The impression is for the writer what experiment is for the scientist, with the difference that in the scientist the work of intelligence precedes the experiment and in the writer it comes after the impression.

Share Quote

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill the gap.

Share Quote

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

Share Quote

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

Share Quote

Featured image credit: IanDagnall Computing/ Alamy Stock Photo

Author image
About the Author
Tony Dunnell
Tony is an English writer of non-fiction and fiction living on the edge of the Amazon jungle.
Play more header background
Play more icon
Daily Question
Who said, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live"?

More Inspiration

happiness theme icon

Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart.

separator icon
Marcel Proust
motivation theme icon

Enthusiasm is the great hill-climber.

separator icon
Elbert Hubbard
hope theme icon

It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails.

separator icon
Romain Rolland
love theme icon

The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer.

separator icon
Fridtjof Nansen
wisdom theme icon

There is only one success... to be able to spend your life in your own way.

separator icon
Christopher Morley
happiness theme icon

Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.

separator icon
Miyamoto Musashi
motivation theme icon

The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

separator icon
Edward Gibbon
hope theme icon

Open to whatever you experience without fighting. Let it be present just as it is. Let go of the battle.

separator icon
Jack Kornfield
love theme icon

I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

separator icon
Sarah Williams
wisdom theme icon

Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control.

separator icon
Jack Kornfield
happiness theme icon

We can smile and relax. Everything we want is right here in the present moment.

separator icon
Thích Nhất Hạnh