Marcel Proust People Quotations

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

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

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

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.

It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.

Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always!

There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.

And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?

So long as I know what's boiling in my pot I don't bother my head about what's in other people's.

Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.

Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.

If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.

We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own.

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.

Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.

We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.

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. It is as though they were traveling abroad.

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.

Le temps qui change les e" tres ne modifie pas l'image que nous avons garde e d'eux. Although time changes people, it cannot change the image we have already made of them.