Marcel Proust

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

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 must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.

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

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

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.

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

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

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

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

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

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

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

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.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.