Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist, widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. His monumental work À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, sometimes translated as Remembrance of Things Past) revolutionized the novel form and remains one of literature’s greatest achievements.
Life
Born into a wealthy Parisian family, Proust was the son of a prominent doctor and a cultured Jewish mother. He suffered from severe asthma throughout his life, which increasingly confined him to his cork-lined bedroom in his later years. He was educated at the Lycée Condorcet and briefly studied law and literature at the Sorbonne.
Proust moved in elite social circles, frequenting Parisian salons and observing the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie with penetrating insight. He was gay, though his sexuality remained largely private during his lifetime, and he had several significant relationships, including with his secretary and companion Alfred Agostinelli.
Literary Work
Proust dedicated the last 14 years of his life to writing his masterpiece, a seven-volume novel that explores memory, time, art, love, jealousy, and society. The work is famous for its:
• Involuntary memory: The famous madeleine episode, where the taste of a cake dipped in tea unlocks a flood of childhood memories
• Psychological depth: Unprecedented exploration of consciousness and perception
• Length: Over 3,000 pages in most editions
• Style: Long, complex sentences that mirror the flow of thought and sensation
The novel’s narrator reflects on his life, relationships, and artistic awakening, ultimately concluding that art alone can recover and give meaning to lost time.
On Memory and Time:
- “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
- “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
- “Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.”
- “The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object which we do not suspect.”
- “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.”
- “An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.”
- “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 think we no longer love our dead, but that is because we do not remember them; suddenly we catch sight of an old glove and burst into tears.”
- “Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person.”
- “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.”
- “The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.”
- “In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.”
- “As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral.”
- “Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.”
- “We think we no longer love the dead; but that is only because we do not remember them; we catch sight suddenly of an old glove, and burst into tears.”
On Love and Relationships:
- “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
- “Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
- “The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.”
- “We love only what we do not wholly possess.”
- “Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.”
- “Love is space and time measured by the heart.”
- “A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.”
- “It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions.”
- “People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive.”
- “The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of her passing.”
- “In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a woman’s heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her.”
- “There is no doubt that a person’s charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: ‘No, this evening I shan’t be free.'”
- “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.”
- “The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity.”
- “When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within us.”
- “Love is not vague; there can be no love without a definite object, however imaginary.”
- “Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either.”
- “The medicine of time, like all the medicines in the world, has a stimulating as well as a sedative effect.”
- “As for happiness, it has only one useful quality, that of making unhappiness possible.”
- “To be harsh with the woman we love is to declare that we cannot do without her.”
On Art, Literature, and Reading:
- “In reading, friendship is restored to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability.”
- “Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself.”
- “Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.”
- “The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”
- “Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
- “A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.”
- “Style for the writer, no less than colour for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision.”
- “A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.”
- “Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.”
- “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.”
- “In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.”
- “Only by art can we get outside ourselves and know another’s view of the universe.”
- “The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is.”
- “Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book.”
- “The artist who renounces an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.”
- “A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.”
- “Great books are written in a sort of foreign language. Under each word each of us puts his own sense or at least his own image.”
- “Music gave her the intoxication of a drug, while at the same time it gave her power to think.”
On Suffering, Happiness, and Growth:
- “We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”
- “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
- “We become moral when we are unhappy.”
- “Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.”
- “We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.”
- “We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
- “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.”
- “The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”
- “Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.”
- “Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly.”
- “We are cured of an illness by experiencing it to the full.”
- “Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.”
- “Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.”
- “Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who found religions and create great works of art.”
- “Suffering! The beautiful countenance of suffering!”
- “One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.”
On Society and Human Nature:
- “The magnificent title of the Baron, without which he would have been but a grocer, had given him a social position which had enabled him to become a great man.”
- “We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.”
- “The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent.”
- “The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.”
- “People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.”
- “We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we once were.”
- “Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.”
- “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.”
- “Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.”
- “Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern.”
On Self-Knowledge and Perception:
- “We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.”
- “The only paradise is paradise lost.”
- “We become ourselves through others.”
- “Facts do not penetrate to the world in which our beliefs reside.”
- “The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.”
- “Our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius.”
- “There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible.”
On Life’s Meaning and Truth:
- “Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
- “We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.”
- “Life is too short, and the world is too wide.”
- “The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”
- “A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.”