Marcel Proust Quotes

It is tragic-comic to see that all this knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over men's lives, that their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but rather the opposite.

I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.

The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, reallyshow very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves.

it's impossible I should have a mind and I have one

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

I do believe as human beings we are a great mass of contradictions.

I am a man of contradictions, I suppose.

I think I appear very innocent and soft, but I'm actually very dark and edgy. It's a weird dichotomy.

Faith is Doubt.

Faith and reason overpower each other throughout one's life, which results in contradiction, but the conflict never ceases in any sphere.

I am a living contradiction.

Ever since I was a little kid, there was something about change that scared me so much, but, at the same time, I've always been terrified of being stuck, so it's kind of like a paradox that I'm living.

↑ top up position down The fact that I suspect I'm an asshole means I probably am not, because a real asshole doesn't think he's an asshole, does he? Therefore, by realizing that I'm an asshole, I am in fact negating that very realization, am I not? Descartes's Asshole Axiom: I think I am; therefor I'm not one.

But I don't even think you hear me at all Under your medieval ceiling behind your biblical wall

There's a booming, rotating, never sleeping city in the center of my brain and no body can come in and I can't escape. I have a strange sense of pride that my brain works that way, but I'm also terrified of what would happen if I ever tried to think in another way.

What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness.

Life it seems a struggle between what we think and what we see

Paradoxes are useful to attract attention to ideas.

The war existing between the senses and reason.

I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.

One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

Behaviors and feelings rarely line up

It is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person. Feelings come quicker than lightning and fill my soul, but they bring me no illumination; they burn me and dazzle me.

At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.

Beauty and fear make uneasy companions