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

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Jonathan Swift

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
Jonathan Swift

Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
Jonathan Swift

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
Jonathan Swift

When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift

Every dog must have his day.
Jonathan Swift

A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention, by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.
Jonathan Swift

A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying… that he is wiser today than yesterday.
Jonathan Swift

A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.
Jonathan Swift

A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.
Jonathan Swift

Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
Jonathan Swift

As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.
Jonathan Swift

As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.
Jonathan Swift

Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.
Jonathan Swift

Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
Jonathan Swift

Don’t set your wit against a child.
Jonathan Swift

Every dog must have his day.
Jonathan Swift

Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.
Jonathan Swift

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
Jonathan Swift

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.
Jonathan Swift

He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
Jonathan Swift

Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.
Jonathan Swift

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.
Jonathan Swift

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
Jonathan Swift

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
Jonathan Swift

I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
Jonathan Swift

I’ve always believed no matter how many shots I miss, I’m going to make the next one.
Jonathan Swift

If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.
Jonathan Swift

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.
Jonathan Swift

Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.
Jonathan Swift

It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.
Jonathan Swift

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
Jonathan Swift

It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.
Jonathan Swift

It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
Jonathan Swift

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
Jonathan Swift

May you live all the days of your life.
Jonathan Swift

Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
Jonathan Swift

Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.
Jonathan Swift

My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.
Jonathan Swift

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
Jonathan Swift

No wise man ever wished to be younger.
Jonathan Swift

Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.
Jonathan Swift

Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
Jonathan Swift

Observation is an old man’s memory.
Jonathan Swift

Once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonably good understanding.
Jonathan Swift

One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
Jonathan Swift

Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
Jonathan Swift

Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
Jonathan Swift

Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with the public will convince them as he himself appears convinced.
Jonathan Swift

Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.
Jonathan Swift

Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.
Jonathan Swift

Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
Jonathan Swift

Proper words in proper places make the true definiton of style.
Jonathan Swift

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.
Jonathan Swift

The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
Jonathan Swift

The latter part of a wise person’s life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.
Jonathan Swift

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
Jonathan Swift

The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.
Jonathan Swift

The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
Jonathan Swift

The want of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.
Jonathan Swift

There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
Jonathan Swift

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.
Jonathan Swift

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.
Jonathan Swift

Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together; Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.
Jonathan Swift

Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.
Jonathan Swift

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
Jonathan Swift

We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.
Jonathan Swift

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Jonathan Swift

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Jonathan Swift

What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.
Jonathan Swift

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift

Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
Jonathan Swift

Where there are large powers with little ambition… nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes.
Jonathan Swift

Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
Jonathan Swift

Behold the turtle. He only makes progress when he sticks his neck out.
James Bryant Conant

Look at each day as a chance to invest life into life. A chance to share your experience and deposit it into someone else’s conscience. Each day is a chance to work miracles in the lives of others.
Jim Rohn

Those who improve with age embrace the power of personal growth and personal achievement and begin to replace youth with wisdom, innocence with understanding, and lack of purpose with self-actualization.
Bo Bennett

If we all did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.
Thomas Edison

All growth depends upon activity. There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work.
Calvin Coolidge

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.
George Eliot

In learning to know other things, and other minds, we become more intimately acquainted with ourselves, and are to ourselves better worth knowing.
Philip Gilbert Hamilton

The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.
Lao Tzu

Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.
Napoleon Hill

Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together.
James Cash Penney

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.
Benjamin Franklin

Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.
M. Scott Peck

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Life is growth. If we stop growing, technically and spiritually, we are as good as dead.
Morihei Ueshiba

Do you want my one-word secret of happiness – It’s growth – mental, financial, you name it.
Harold Geneen

The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.
Mortimer Adler

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
Aristotle

Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world.
Miguel de Cervantes

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.
Albert Einstein

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.
Oscar Wilde

People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.
Plato

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.
Eleanor Roosevelt

If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?
Gloria Steinem

Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow…
Lawrence Clark Powell

He who moves not forward, goes backward.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.
Unknown

The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates

Rene Descartes (March 31, 1596 – February 11, 1650), also known as Renatus Cartesius (Latinized form),[2] was a French philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the “Father of Modern Philosophy”, and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which continue to be studied closely to this day. In particular, his Meditations on First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments. Descartes’ influence in mathematics is also apparent, the Cartesian coordinate system—allowing geometric shapes to be expressed in algebraic equations—being named for him. He is credited as the father of analytical geometry. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution. Descartes founded analytic geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry, crucial to the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. He is best known for the philosophical statement “Cogito ergo sum” (French: Je pense, donc je suis; English: I think, therefore I am; or I am thinking, therefore I exist), found in part IV of Discourse on the Method (1637 – written in French but with inclusion of “Cogito ergo sum”) and §7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (1644 – written in Latin).

Cogito ergo sum. (I think; therefore I am.)
Rene Descartes

In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
Rene Descartes

Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
Rene Descartes

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.
Rene Descartes

An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?
Rene Descartes

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.
Rene Descartes

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
Rene Descartes

A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed.
Rene Descartes

Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.
Rene Descartes

Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.
Rene Descartes

Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.
Rene Descartes

Everything is self-evident.
Rene Descartes

I am indeed amazed when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error.
Rene Descartes

I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.
Rene Descartes

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
Rene Descartes

Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
Rene Descartes

In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
Rene Descartes

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.
Rene Descartes

It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.
Rene Descartes

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.
Rene Descartes

Perfect numbers, like perfect men, are very rare.
Rene Descartes

The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.
Rene Descartes

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.
Rene Descartes

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
Rene Descartes

The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.
Rene Descartes

The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.
Rene Descartes

There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.
Rene Descartes

Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries.
Rene Descartes

When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.
Rene Descartes

Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.
Rene Descartes

You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.
Rene Descartes

Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll (August 11, 1833 – July 21, 1899) was a Civil War veteran, American political leader, and orator during the Golden Age of Freethought, noted for his broad range of culture and his defense of agnosticism.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.
Robert G. Ingersoll

Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.
Robert G. Ingersoll

The Church has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down.
Robert G. Ingersoll

In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.
Robert G. Ingersoll

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.
Robert G. Ingersoll

Justice should remove the bandage from her eyes long enough to distinguish between the vicious and the unfortunate.
Robert G. Ingersoll

Kindness is the sunshine in which virtue grows.
Robert G. Ingersoll

Few rich men own their own property. Their property owns them.
Robert G. Ingersoll

The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future.
Robert G. Ingersoll

Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.
Robert G. Ingersoll

In nature there are neither rewards or punishments-there are consequences.
Robert G. Ingersoll

The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here.
Robert G. Ingersoll

If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child. It has filled the good with horror and with fear; but it has had no effect upon the infamous and base. It has wrung the hearts of the tender, it has furrowed the cheeks of the good. This doctrine never should be preached again. What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena.
Robert G. Ingersoll

It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.
Robert G. Ingersoll

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.
Robert G. Ingersoll

If there be an infinite Being, he does not need our help — we need not waste our energies in his defense.
Robert G. Ingersoll

My principal objections to orthodox religion are two – slavery here and hell hereafter.
Robert G. Ingersoll

Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?
Robert G. Ingersoll

But honest men do not pretend to know; they are candid and sincere; they love the truth; they admit their ignorance, and they say, “We do not know.”
Robert G. Ingersoll

No man with a sense of humour ever founded a religion.
Robert G. Ingersoll

Ministers say that they teach charity. This is natural. They live on alms. All beggars teach that others should give.
Robert G. Ingersoll

Labor is the only prayer that Nature answers; it is the only prayer that deserves an answer — good, honest, noble work.
Robert G. Ingersoll

In all ages hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns on the heads of thieves, called kings.
Robert G. Ingersoll

Christianity has such a contemptible opinion of human nature that it does not believe a man can tell the truth unless frightened by a belief in God. No lower opinion of the human race has ever been expressed.
Robert G. Ingersoll

As long as every question is answered by the word “God,” scientific inquiry is simply impossible.
Robert G. Ingersoll

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.
Robert G. Ingersoll

If I owe Smith ten dollars and God forgives me, that doesn’t pay Smith.
Robert G. Ingersoll