Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees. – Marcel Proust
Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two. – Marcel Proust
The time at our disposal each day is elastic the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it. – Marcel Proust
Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible. – Marcel Proust
Life is a chaplet of little miseries, which the philosopher unstrings with a smile. Be philosophers as I am, gentlemen; sit down to the table and let us drink; nothing makes the future look so bright as surveying it through a glass of chambertin. – Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers (1844), “Chapter XLVII: A Family Affair,”