Marcel Proust Quotes

I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life.

Man is a wonder to himself; he can neither govern nor know himself.

I've been living with myself all of my life, so I know all of me. So when I watch me, all I see is me. It's boring.

I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

No matter what we talk about, we are talking about ourselves.

I don't find myself intriguing.

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.

The better you understand yourself the less cause you will find to love yourself.

How can anyone see straight when he does not see himself and the darkness he unconsciously carries with him into all his dealings?

Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.

A [wo]man who is unconscious of [her/]himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbour.

Self knowledge is always bad news.

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ''Know thyself,'' and too often leads to a self- estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

The highest purpose of intellectual cultivation is to give a man a perfect knowledge and mastery of his own inner self.

The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.

How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: "this is really you, this is no longer outer shell.

The sight of one's own heart is degrading; people are not meant to look inward - that's why they've been given bodies, to hide their souls.

We must remember that knowledge of one’s own deep nature is also simultaneously knowledge of human nature in general.