It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
– Marcel Proust
Related Quotes:
- Love is infinite. Grief can lead to love. Love can lead to grief. Grief is a love story told backward just as love is a grief story told backward. – Bridget Asher
- The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection. – Marcel Proust
- It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions – Marcel Proust
- Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. – Joan Didion
- The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day. – Marcel Proust
- Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude. – Marcel Proust
- A book is no mere book anymore than man can be mere man. A book was like an individual man, unmatched and with no cause of existence beyond himself. – Marcel Proust
- Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination. – Marcel Proust
- Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. – Marcel Proust
- We needed germans in Paris to hear Wagner. – Marcel Proust
- After a certain age, and even if we develop in quite different ways, the more we become ourselves, the more our family traits are accentuated. – Marcel Proust
- But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real point of intersection between reality and dream. – Marcel Proust
- So difficult is it for us to know, with the dead as with the living, whether a thing would cause them joy or sorrow! – Marcel Proust
- She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive. – Marcel Proust
- … rejoicing in a peace which brings only an increase of anxiety,… – Marcel Proust
- As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past. – Marcel Proust
- She’s got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy. – Marcel Proust
- Sadness had reigned in undisputed sovereignty over his shadowed childhood. – Marcel Proust
- It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering. – Marcel Proust
- Presently, one after another, like shyly hopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow. – Marcel Proust
- Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were. – Marcel Proust
- And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream. – Marcel Proust
- that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching to seek pleasure elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth. – Marcel Proust
- She was not yet dead. But I was already alone. – Marcel Proust
- We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full. – Marcel Proust
- It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil. – Marcel Proust
- One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one loves. – Marcel Proust
- To determine not to think of it was but to think of it still, to suffer from it still. – Marcel Proust
- The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought. – Marcel Proust
- Quite half of the human race was in tears. – Marcel Proust
- It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be a bad one. – Marcel Proust
- When we are nice to others, we generally lose all claim to their respect. – Marcel Proust
- … the kiss, the bodily surrender which would seem natural and but moderately attractive… – Marcel Proust
- We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence. – Marcel Proust
- I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep. – Marcel Proust
- The beauty of images lies behind things, the beauty of ideas in front of them. – Marcel Proust
- Ideas are substitutes for sorrows… – Marcel Proust
- …for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own. – Marcel Proust
- A ‘sadist’ of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be… – Marcel Proust
- His [Morel’s] nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out. – Marcel Proust