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

- Marcel Proust

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

- Marcel Proust

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

- Marcel Proust

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

- Marcel Proust

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.

- Marcel Proust

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

- Marcel Proust

We become moral when we are unhappy.

- Marcel Proust

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

- Marcel Proust

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

- Marcel Proust

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

- Marcel Proust

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.

- Marcel Proust

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

- Marcel Proust

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

- Marcel Proust

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.

- Marcel Proust

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

- 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

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

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.

- Marcel Proust

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.

- Marcel Proust

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

- Marcel Proust