Art & Creativity Quote by Marcel Proust

Proust makes empathy sound less like a virtue and more like a technology: art is the only device powerful enough to pry us out of the sealed chamber of the self. The line works because it doesn’t flatter our everyday imagination. We like to believe we “get” other people through conversation, good intentions, or shared experience; Proust quietly calls that bluff. Ordinary life keeps us trapped in habit, perception dulled by routine and self-interest. Art, by contrast, re-sensitizes. It forces attention, slows time, and rearranges what we think we know into a new order we can’t unsee.

The subtext is distinctly Proustian: reality isn’t simply out there to be observed; it’s filtered through temperament, memory, desire. To “know what another person sees” isn’t about acquiring information, it’s about undergoing a shift in consciousness. A novel, a painting, a piece of music can simulate a foreign interiority - not by translating it into our terms, but by making us inhabit someone else’s pattern of noticing. That’s why his phrasing is bodily and spatial: we “emerge” from ourselves, as if leaving a room we didn’t realize had locked doors.

Context matters. Writing at the turn of the 20th century, Proust is responding to a modern world where social roles, class performance, and salon manners create constant misrecognition. In that environment, art becomes both antidote and critique: it exposes how little we see of each other, and how radical it is to try.