Marcel Proust Quotes

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.

what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

I'm ready to take on different selves and experiment and see what happens.

I was heading off to my new world. But I was taking a part of my past, and the future, along with me for the ride.

Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

All change brings bad things and good things to replace the bad and good things that were before. It is natural to look back and say it was better before—but that does not make it true. Different is not worse. It is just different.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

There's nothing you can do about the past. But, you can do a great deal about your future. You don't have to be the same person you were yesterday. You can make changes in your life -- absolutely startling changes in a fairly short time. You can make changes you can't even conceive of now, if you give yourself a chance.

Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation.

With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.

The true self is always in motion like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining.

I did not lose myself all at once.

Where do you put a form? It will move all around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through.

What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are.

One is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person.

Love doesn't erase the past, but it makes the future different.

You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

Visiting old haunts is hard on memory. Things shrink, change, and disappear.

Change is the end result of all true learning. Change involves three things: First, a dissatisfaction with self - a felt void or need; second, a decision to change to fill the void or need; and third, a conscious dedication to the process of growth and change - the willful act of making the change, doing something.

For things to change, you have to change. For things to be different, you have to be different. Before financial success can occur personal growth must occur.

But I will find new habits, new thoughts, new rules. I will become something else.

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

You can't become another person if you're not self-aware.