I. Frost's Selected Quotations

Everything at Amazon by and about: Marcel Proust

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

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

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.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

The true paradises are the lost paradises.

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

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.

The one thing more difficult than following a regimen is not imposing it on others.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

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

The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome

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

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left."

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

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

Everything great that we know has come from neurotics never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor above all what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

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

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full

understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last

Impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance."