Marcel Proust

"Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude."

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

"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 grief that develops the powers of the mind."

"Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up."

"Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline ... reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the Spirit."

"People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura oflife which bears no relation to true immortality but through which theycontinue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. Itis as though they were traveling abroad."

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

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

"One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone."

"My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing."

"Love is space and time measured by the heart."

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

"People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura oflife which bears no relation to true immortality but through which theycontinue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. Itis as though they were traveling abroad."