Marcel Proust

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

The charms of life are what keep us alive.

We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. We have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement.

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, and effort which no one can spare us.

What we believe to be our love or our hate is not, in the end, quite what we believed it to be.

If only for vanity's sake, we prefer to make our own mistakes than to have other people make them for us.

The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is.

We can only be certain of the things we are no longer good for.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself.

We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.