"Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit"
About this Quote
Proust doesn’t romanticize lying as a moral lapse; he treats it as infrastructure. In his world, deception isn’t an exception to human nature but one of its operating systems, bundled with desire the way perfume clings to skin. The line’s provocation is deliberate: by placing lies alongside “the pursuit of pleasure,” he yanks dishonesty out of the courtroom and into the bedroom, the salon, the family letter. The scandal isn’t that people lie. It’s that lying keeps the machinery of wanting from grinding to a halt.
The subtext is Proust’s recurring insight that we rarely pursue pleasure directly. We pursue the story of pleasure: our self-image as lovable, admirable, unburdened, chosen. Lies become the narrative technology that protects those stories from reality’s rough edits. You lie to keep someone close, to keep yourself interesting, to keep time from showing on your face. Even “sincere” people curate, omit, revise - not always to harm, but to preserve an atmosphere in which pleasure can happen at all.
Context matters: Proust is writing in a late-19th/early-20th century milieu where reputation is social currency and desire is hemmed in by class codes and sexual discretion. In that environment, truth is rarely a virtue; it’s a weapon or a blunder. The sentence works because it’s both cynical and clinical: he doesn’t excuse deception, he explains its seduction. Pleasure, he implies, doesn’t just invite lying - it requires it, because pleasure thrives on illusion the way memory does: selectively, artistically, and with a ruthless eye for what must be left out.
The subtext is Proust’s recurring insight that we rarely pursue pleasure directly. We pursue the story of pleasure: our self-image as lovable, admirable, unburdened, chosen. Lies become the narrative technology that protects those stories from reality’s rough edits. You lie to keep someone close, to keep yourself interesting, to keep time from showing on your face. Even “sincere” people curate, omit, revise - not always to harm, but to preserve an atmosphere in which pleasure can happen at all.
Context matters: Proust is writing in a late-19th/early-20th century milieu where reputation is social currency and desire is hemmed in by class codes and sexual discretion. In that environment, truth is rarely a virtue; it’s a weapon or a blunder. The sentence works because it’s both cynical and clinical: he doesn’t excuse deception, he explains its seduction. Pleasure, he implies, doesn’t just invite lying - it requires it, because pleasure thrives on illusion the way memory does: selectively, artistically, and with a ruthless eye for what must be left out.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|
More Quotes by Marcel
Add to List
