Marcel Proust Quotes

The wolf in him demanded he kick (the door) down and claim her. The man in him just wanted to hold her close and protect her. He’d never been so torn. So confused. So damned horny!

The force of passion is balanced by the force of interest.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

Well, I believe that life is very complicated. And in a way, the only way you can show life in a truthful way is to show how complicated it is as an individual, but also your relation between a complicated life and the complications you have inside you.

As attractive as it is, the idea that nature can exist beyond our dangerous 'instinct for happiness' is never the whole story.

The more unharmonious and inconsistent your objects of desire, the more inconsequent, inconstant, unquiet, the more ignoble, idiotical, and criminal yourself.

We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness.

That's the number one thing I hear about humans. You have all these choices, so you're confused all the time, and you think so much that you're never happy.

It hurts to want everything and nothing at the same time.

My intentions go one way, my desires another. Thus I feel both self-indulgent and deprived.

It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that’s the sin that can’t be forgiven--that I hadn’t done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there’s no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain--and wasted pain...why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage.

Where are there are two desires in a man's heart he has no choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived.

What keeps us from achieving our heart's desires is not anything outside of us, it's the conflict inside.

Strange, the desire for certain pleasures is a part of my pain.

She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.

We are never present with, but always beyond ourselves; fear, desire, hope, still push us on toward the future.

You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.

It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.

You have always fought against your dreams, and 'I want' has never even shown its face. It was always drowned out by 'I must' or 'I hope' or 'I need...'

Fairy tales begin with conflict because we all begin our lives with conflict. We are all misfit for the world, and somehow we must fit in, fit in with other people, and thus we must invent or find the means through communication to satisfy as well as resolve conflicting desires and instincts.

Men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat - seamy on both sides.

As many have discovered, it is entirely possible (although not particularly desirable) to love two people with all your heart. It is entirely possible to long for two lives, to feel that one life can't come close to containing it all.

I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.

I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally.

Hard to say what's right when all I wanna do is wrong.