Quotes by Marcel Proust

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

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

"The only real voyage consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes; in seeing the universe through the eyes of another, one hundred others--in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees."

What keeps people from suffering very much is lack of imagination.... Everything great that we know has come from neurotics. It is they and only they who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor, above all, how much they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts upon it.

“What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing.  Seek?  More than that:  create.  It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.”

                         

Le veritable voyage de decouverte ne consiste pas a chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais a  avoir de nouveaux yeux. (The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.)

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

There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu'on a perdus. The true paradises are the lost paradises.