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Art
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A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
-Marcel Proust
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Authors & Writing
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I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
-Marcel Proust
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Body, the
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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
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Change
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Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
-Marcel Proust
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Charisma
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The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.
-Marcel Proust
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Creativity
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I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.
-Marcel Proust
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Death
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We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
-Marcel Proust
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Deception/Lying
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Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
-Marcel Proust
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Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
-Marcel Proust
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Decisions
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Impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions.
-Marcel Proust
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All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
-Marcel Proust
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Desires
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We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
-Marcel Proust
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There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.
-Marcel Proust
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Discovery
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of hundreds of others, in seeing the hundreds of universes that each of them sees.
-Marcel Proust
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Doctors
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The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome.
-Marcel Proust
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For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
-Marcel Proust
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Dreams
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When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300401.txt
-Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove Vol. 2 of Remembrance of Things Past
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Expectation
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A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
-Marcel Proust
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Face, Faces
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The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.
-Marcel Proust
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Greatness & Great Things
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Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
original French: Tout ce que nous connaissons de grand nous vient des nerveux. Ce sont eux et non pas d
-Marcel Proust, Guermantes Way, 1921
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Habits
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The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity.
-Marcel Proust
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Happiness
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Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
-Marcel Proust
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Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
-Marcel Proust
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Ideas
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A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
-Marcel Proust
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Illness, Disease, Sickness
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Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge we make promise only; pain we obey.
-Marcel Proust
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Books by and about Marcel Proust