Marcel Proust Quotes

His grandfather had often told him that he tried too hard to move trees when a wiser man would walk around them.

Only the soldier pines and sentinels still showed green; the broadleaf trees had donned mantles of russet and gold, or else uncloaked themselves to scratch against the sky with branches brown and bare.

The path of progress is seldom smooth. New things are often found hard to do. Our fathers found them so. We find them so. But are we not made better for the effort and scarifice?

I do not argue with obstinate men. I act in spite of them.

I think I was born stubborn, that's all.

Unless you've a lot of passion about this, you're not gonna survive. You're gonna give it up. So you've got to have an idea or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about, otherwise you're not gonna have the perseverance to stick it through. I think it's half the battle right there.

It was a cold day but the sun was out and the trees were like great bonfires against gray distant fields and hills.

The tree falls not at the first stroke.

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.

It’s a wonder I’m even alive. Sometimes I think that. I think that I can’t believe I haven’t killed myself. But there’s something in me that just keeps going on. I think it has something to do with tomorrow, that there is always one, and that everything can change when it comes.

To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.

Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience.

No man is good for anything who has not some particle of obstinacy to use upon occasion.

I won't give up. Even if the skies get rough.

Stubbornness usually is considered a negative; but I think that trait has been a positive for me.

When there's no sign of hope in the desert, so much hope still lives inside despair. Heart, don't kill that hope.

I am determined to make the most of this life that I have, damn it - it's that kind of stubbornness I think we all need more of.

According to ancient mythology, trees link the Earth to the sky. In this respect trees link humans to another world.

You could be the leaf that never falls from the tree you could be the sun that never leaves the sky this might be the happy ending without the ending this might be a reason to try

And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.

The turn from this end [despair] to a new beginning came from three things. A blooming cherry tree, the unexpected kindness of Scottish workers and their families, and the Bible.

The Yankee is one who, if he once gets his teeth set on a thing, all creation can't make him let go.

I assert once again as a truth to which history as a whole bears witness that men may second their fortune, but cannot oppose it; that they may weave its warp, but cannot break it. Yet they should never give up, because there is always hope, though they know not the end and more towards it along roads which cross one another and as yet are unexplored; and since there is hope, they should not despair, no matter what fortune brings or in what travail they find themselves.