Marcel Proust: Quotes about love

“In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.”

Marcel Proust book In Search of Lost Time

Autrefois on rêvait de posséder le cœur de la femme dont on était amoureux; plus tard sentir qu’on possède le cœur d’une femme peut suffire à vous en rendre amoureux.
"Swann in Love"
In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol I: Swann's Way (1913)

Love , Dreams , Feeling , Heart

“Love is space and time made tender to the heart.”

Marcel Proust book In Search of Lost Time

L'amour, c'est l'espace et le temps rendus sensibles au coeur.
Variant translations:
Love is space and time made sensitive to the heart.
Love is space and time measured by the heart.
In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol. V: The Captive (1923)

Love , Time , Heart

“Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.”

Marcel Proust book In Search of Lost Time

Comme tous les gens qui ne sont pas amoureux, il s'imaginait qu'on choisit la personne qu'on aime après mille délibérations et d'après des qualités et convenances diverses.
Pt. II, Ch. 1
In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol. IV: Cities of the Plain (1921-1922)

Love , Imagination , Personality

“In love, happiness is an abnormal state.”

Marcel Proust book In Search of Lost Time

[Le bonheur] est, dans l'amour, un état anormal.
In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol II: Within a Budding Grove (1919)

Love , Happiness

“The bonds that unite another person to ourself exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”

Marcel Proust book In Search of Lost Time

Les liens entre un être et nous n'existent que dans notre pensée. La mémoire en s'affaiblissant les relâche, et, malgré l'illusion dont nous voudrions être dupes et dont, par amour, par amitié, par politesse, par respect humain, par devoir, nous dupons les autres, nous existons seuls. L'homme est l'être qui ne peut sortir de soi, qui ne connaît les autres qu'en soi, et, en disant le contraire, ment.
Source: In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol. VI: The Sweet Cheat Gone (1925), Ch. I: "Grief and Oblivion"

Love , Friendship , People , Lying

“Faced with the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as the world's first natural philosophers must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown.”

Marcel Proust book In Search of Lost Time

In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol II: Within a Budding Grove (1919)

Love , World , Nature , Light