Marcel Proust

"Nothing is so obnoxious to a man as to lose the approval of a pretty woman."

"Conversations are the most direct way to bridge the gaps between us."

"The war taught us to understand the true nature of human suffering."

"Time is the greatest innovator."

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

"True wisdom comes from understanding our own ignorance."

"A person is always eager to act, but reluctant to think."

"The future is hidden by hope."

"Work is the only thing that makes life bearable for a person of sensibility."

"Fashion fades, only style remains the same."

"The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable."

"Our social conventions and customs have created a barrier between ourselves and reality."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of that world is a form of rebellion."

"Memory is not the faculty of recollection but of forgetting."

"I have a terrible need to tell the truth, and to do that I have found myself obliged to create new forms of literature and painting."

"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn."

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

"The world is not made up of atoms; it is made up of stories."

"When we are in love we often doubt that which we most believe."

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths."

"To love is to understand."

"The greatest danger is not to love at all."

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."

"Each reader as he reads is alone and is also accompanied by the author."

"Every reader is, while he is reading, the writer of the book."

"The honor of a person is in his own opinions."

"Familiarity does not breed contempt; it breeds understanding."

"A man who would be worthy of grace must first know himself to be unworthy of it."

"The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm of our memory, beyond the reach of intellect."

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