Marcel Proust

“Love is space and time measured by the heart.”

“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.”

“Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.”

“Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.”

“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.”

“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”

“Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.”

“As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.”

“Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.”

“A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.”

“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

“Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.”

“Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.”

“A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.”

“Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.”