Love Quote by Marcel Proust

Proust skewers the comforting myth that love is a rational consumer choice, assembled from pros-and-cons lists and “particular qualities or advantages.” The jab lands because it targets a posture most people recognize: the non-lover’s confidence that desire is legible, that attraction can be audited like a résumé. That faith in deliberation isn’t just naïveté; it’s self-protection. If love is a decision, it can be controlled, corrected, optimized. If love is an event that happens to you, it’s terrifying.

The line’s quiet cruelty sits in the opening clause: “Like everybody who is not in love.” Proust turns a private misunderstanding into a social majority position. The outside observer doesn’t merely lack information; he inhabits an entire worldview where human feeling behaves politely, following reasons. Proust is mocking that worldview’s bourgeois logic: the belief that affection should be justified by “advantages,” as if intimacy were a transaction and the beloved a bundle of features.

Contextually, this fits Proust’s larger project: exposing how we narrate our own impulses after the fact. Love, in his universe, is less a response to the beloved’s objective worth than a story the lover compulsively writes to make his captivity feel chosen. The subtext is brutal: “endless deliberations” are often just elaborate alibis. We don’t select love; we retrofit explanations for why we couldn’t help it.