Life & Wisdom Quote by Marcel Proust

Proust quietly sabotages the fantasy of the perfectly rational, permanent self. “All our final decisions” sounds like a courtroom: definitive, adult, settled. Then he punctures it with the almost comic instability of “a state of mind that is not going to last.” The line is devastating because it doesn’t argue against decision-making; it argues against the arrogance baked into the word final.

The intent is less self-help than self-exposure. Proust is writing from a world where memory, desire, and perception constantly rewrite the past. In his novels, a scent can reorganize a life; a social slight can become a lifelong myth. So the subtext here is that choice is rarely a clean expression of character. It’s a snapshot taken under bad lighting: jealousy, fatigue, infatuation, pride, relief. We sign our names to that snapshot and then act surprised when the person in it isn’t who we are six months later.

What makes the sentence work is its time-bomb structure. It grants the reader the comfort of responsibility (“our decisions”), then removes the ground beneath responsibility (“a state of mind”), then adds the final twist: that state is temporary. Proust isn’t excusing inconsistency; he’s diagnosing it. The context is early modernity’s growing skepticism about stable identity, plus his own obsession with how inner life mutates. The line lands today because it reads like an antidote to hot-take culture and permanent records: the tragedy isn’t that we change, it’s that we keep demanding vows from moods.