Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

The aphorism warns that memory is not a neutral archive. What we “remember” is shaped by later knowledge, desire, regret, and narrative habits; the past is reassembled from fragments rather than replayed intact. Proust’s broader insight is that the self who remembers is not the self who originally experienced the event, so recollection inevitably alters what it claims to preserve. The line also implies a tension between factual history and psychological truth: even distorted memories can be meaningful because they reveal the present mind’s needs and values as much as they report earlier reality.