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"Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty."
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"We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future?"

"Ethics are the things that say, 'Don't stick your finger in the socket.' The world says, 'It's okay because we've shut off the electricity.' And at the point that we've chosen to listen to the world and ignore our ethics, we say, 'I'm having a really hard time getting back up."

"Do not treat others as you would not like to be treated' frees one from hypocrisy. 'Treat others as you would like to be treated' enslaves one with insincerity."

"It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit."
Explore more quotes by Marcel Proust

"People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura oflife which bears no relation to true immortality but through which theycontinue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. Itis as though they were traveling abroad."

"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us."

"A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu."

"It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying."

"... the courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the 'other side'..."

"That our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people desire from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them, is a fact which is perpetually demonstrated in daily life."

"Even from the point of view of coquetry, pure and simple," he had told her, "can't you see how much of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying?"

"... Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart."

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book."
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