Marcel Proust (July 10, 1871 – November 18, 1922) was a French novelist, critic and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past).

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions, and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them, nor all they have suffered to enrich us.
Marcel Proust

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

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy: They are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Marcel Proust

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another’s view of the universe.
Marcel Proust

The one thing more difficult than following a regimen is not imposing it on others.
Marcel Proust

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

It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
Marcel Proust

Let us leave pretty women to men without imagination.
Marcel Proust

The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
Marcel Proust

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
Marcel Proust

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

“Love is space and time measured by the heart.”
Marcel Proust

“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust

“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.”
Marcel Proust

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

“Love is a reciprocal torture.”
Marcel Proust

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

“Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.”
Marcel Proust

“What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.”
Marcel Proust

“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.”
Marcel Proust