I’ve never made it all the way through Proust’s epic, Remembrance of Things Past, aka A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Still, I consider Marcel Proust one of my heroes.
His insights into the human condition are nothing short of extraordinary.
Here is one of my favorite quotes from the translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin.
“The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them…”
This quote reminds me that we have not evolved to such lofty heights today that we fail to see how similar we are to our ancestors.
Here are a couple more of his quotes.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
How insightful!
“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.”
Proust’s narrator writes about some of the big and quiet emotions that swept through him as a child and later as a young man. Readers become intimately familiar with his actions, thoughts, and dreams.
The power of his words is nothing short of extraordinary!
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