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Imagination
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Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
-Marcel Proust
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Infidelity
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A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
-Marcel Proust
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Intelligence
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Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.
-Marcel Proust
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Love
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People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.
-Marcel Proust
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In a separation it is the one who is not really in loved who says the more tender things.
-Marcel Proust
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Memory
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We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
-Marcel Proust
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That translucent alabaster of our memories.
-Marcel Proust
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Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.
-Marcel Proust
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Men & Women
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Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
-Marcel Proust
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Mental Illness
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The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves.
-Marcel Proust
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Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient?
-Marcel Proust
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Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
-Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1925)
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Morals
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We become moral when we are unhappy.
-Marcel Proust
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Paradox
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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
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Past, the
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The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.
-Marcel Proust
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Plagiarism
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The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.
-Marcel Proust
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Pleasure
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People have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.
-Marcel Proust
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Proverbial Wisdom
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As the Arab proverb says, The dog barks and the caravan passes. After having dropped this quotation, Mr. Norpois stopped to judge the effect it had on us. It was great; the proverb was known to us: it had been replaced that year among men of high worth by this other: Whoever sows the wind reaps the storm, which had needed some rest since it was not as indefatigable and hardy as, Working for the King of Prussia.
-Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. II. Within a Budding Grove, 1918
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Regret & Remorse
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There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.
-Marcel Proust
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Relationships
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The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.
-Marcel Proust
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Relaxation
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The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills up what remains.
-Marcel Proust
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Risk
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People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
-Marcel Proust
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Sleep
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It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.
-Marcel Proust
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Solutions
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It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.
-Marcel Proust
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Suffering
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We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.
-Marcel Proust
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Books by and about Marcel Proust