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"But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others."
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"I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself, maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it."

"You are the only one of your kind."

"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away."

"We have worth because we were created in the image and likeness of God."

"You must wear clothes which suits your own soul, not your own society! What you wish to do is much more important than what your society wants you to do!"

"You are the architect of your future, you decide whether you build a hut or a palace."
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."

"The so-called sensitivity of neurotics develops along with their egotism, they cannot bear for other people to flaunt the sufferings with which they are increasingly preoccupied themselves."

"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'..."

"No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice."

"And so too, in later years, when I began to write a book of my own, and the quality of some sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to go on with the undertaking. I would find the equivalent in Bergotte. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages, that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I had perceived in my mind's eye, and in my fear of their not turning out "true to life," how could I find time to ask myself whether what I was writing was pleasing!"
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