Marcel Proust Quotes

The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is.

The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.

Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place - from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind.

You know more about me than I do about myself, that's probably true.

I have always written only for myself - to clarify things, to clarify things with myself, to understand in an inner way what is actually happening.

I don't know what other people are doing - I just know about me.

I don't consciously use my own life or experience at all.

Most of us don't spend any time knowing ourselves. We just keep reacting.

Madame Bovary is myself.

Nothing said to us, nothing we can learn from others, reaches us so deep as that which we find in ourselves.

Then, at some point, you get identified with certain things.

For a memoir to really succeed, the author has to do such hard work before they come to the page. They have to do a brutal self-examination of everything they believe to be true.

There isn't really a whole lot to know about me.

To every man in the world there is one person of whom he knows little: whom he would never recognize if he met him walking down the street, whose motives are a mystery to him. That is himself.

I stare at the mirror as I try to remember who I am and who I am not.

To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.

Opportunity makes us known to others, but more to ourselves.

The more you understand yourself, the more you will understand the world.

People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding — a thing which is rather surmised and never spoken than known and clothed in words.

We are nearer neighbors to ourselves than the whiteness of snow or the weight of stones are to us: if man does not know himself, how should he know his functions and powers?

Of all knowledge the wise and good seek most to know themselves.

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.

To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.

To know yourself you need not go to any book, to any priest, to any psychologist. The whole treasure is within yourself.

The place you have to start to be any good at this, at acting, is with yourself. Everything is inside of you, all of it - the murderer, the great mother, the therapist, the husband. Everything is inside of us.