What criterion ought one to adapt to judge one's fellows? After all, there was not a single person he knew who might not, in certain circumstances, prove capable of a shameful action.

— Marcel Proust

What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.

— Marcel Proust

Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them.

— Marcel Proust

When he spoke, his words came with a confusion which was delightful to hear because one felt that it indicated not so much a defect in his speech as a quality of his soul, as it were a survival from the age of innocence which he had never wholly outgrown.

— Marcel Proust

When Jean and his mother left Etreuilles, Monsieur Bureau had gathered for them great boxfuls of hawthorn and of snowballs which Madame Santeria had not the courage to refuse. But, as soon as Jean's uncle had gone home, she threw them away, saying that they already had more than enough in the way of luggage. And then Jean cried because he had been separated from the darling creatures which he would have liked to take with him to Paris, and because of his mother's naughtiness.

— Marcel Proust

When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory

— Marcel Proust

When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one ought to say to oneself, “What are her surroundings? What has been her life? All one’s future happiness lies in the answer.

— Marcel Proust

... when she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come upon my aunts' old music-master, she was moved to very real grief, and shuddered to think of that other grief, so different in its bitterness, which Mlle. Virtual must now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having virtually killed her father.

— Marcel Proust

When we are nice to others, we generally lose all claim to their respect.

— Marcel Proust

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.

— Marcel Proust