Quotes by French Authors - Page 103

I am going to seek a great Perhaps.
Frangois Rabelais
Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
Albert Camus
Keep me rather in this cage, and feed me sparingly, if you dare. Anything that brings me closer to illness and the edge of death makes me more faithful. It is only when you make me suffer that I feel safe and secure. You should never have agreed to be a god for me if you were afraid to assume the duties of a god, and we know that they are not as tender as all that. You have already seen me cry. Now you must learn to relish my tears.
Pauline Réage
I am incapable of mediocrity.
Serge Gainsbourg
Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!
Hilaire Belloc
Ma couce... mon incomparable! T'aimer? Mais je t'ai adorée toute ma vie et je ne cesserai jamais de t'aimer? Jamais! Tant qu'il me restera une pensée, un souffle, je t'aimerais...
Juliette Benzoni
At the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of revolution, was Combeferre, representing its philosophy. The difference between logic and philosophy is that one can decide upon war, whereas the other can only be fulfilled by peace.
Victor Hugo
We are rich only through what we give and poor only through what we refuse.
Anne-Sophie Swetchine
The religion of orgasm: utilitarianism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explosion, the only true goal of love-making and of the universe.
Milan Kundera
From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent. It can only be squandered.
Roman Payne
The Ladies of the Sacred Heart hung a thousand veils between their little charges and reality. Thérèse despised them for confounding virtue with ignorance.
François Mauriac
But how conceive a God supremely good/ Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,/ Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?[Written after an earthquake in Lisbon killed over 15,000 people]
Voltaire
Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands.
Gustave Flaubert
This is my thesis: Do you know what is needful to turn an honest man into a rogue! A change of scene--a moment's forgetfulness suffice.
André Gide
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Jean Cocteau
It's the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important...People have forgotten this truth, but you mustn't forget it. You become responsible forever for what you've tamed. You're responsible for your rose.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in our real lives, we know very little about our parents as they were before our birth; we have only fragmentary knowledge of the people close to us: we see them come and go and scarcely have they vanished than their place is taken over by others: they form a long line of replaceable beings. Only the novel separates out an individual, trains a light on his biography, his ideas, his feelings, makes him irreplaceable: makes him the center of everything.
Milan Kundera
That which is striking and beautiful is not always good but that which is good is always beautiful.
Ninon de l'Enclos
For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
There are those to whom one must advise madness.
Joseph Joubert
He was fond of saying, "There is a bravery of the priest as well as the bravery of a colonel of dragoons,--only," he added, "ours must be tranquil.
Victor Hugo
At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
Albert Camus
Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.
Georges Carpentier
All the while that Jean was listening to him, he was vaguely conscious that what gives literature its reality is the result of work accomplished by the human spirit, no matter what the material facts that may have stimulated it (a walk, a night of love, a social drama), of a sort of discovery in the world of the spirit, of the emotions, made by the human intelligence, so that the value of a book is never in the material presented by the writer, but in the nature of the operation he performs upon it.
Marcel Proust
She abandoned herself to his whim, thinking it was to be an orgy of eyes and hands only.
Anaïs Nin
I shed more tears than God could ever have required.
Arthur Rimbaud
Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again.
Gustave Flaubert
The world exists to end up in a book.
Stéphane Mallarmé
I believe that we are henceforth incapable of returning to an order of moral life which would take the form of a simple submission to commandments or to an alien or supreme will, even if this will were represented as divine. We must accept as a positive good the critique of ethics and religion that has been undertaken by the school of suspicion. From it we have learned to understand that the commandment that gives death, not life, is a product and projection of our own weakness.
Paul Ricœur
I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don't need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one can know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the eternal vault like the ancients. My God! mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I am for the profession of faith of the 'Savoyard Vicar,' and the immortal principles of '89! And I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which proves to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.
Gustave Flaubert
My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play.
Marcel Proust
Herein is a capital truth. It is not the natural capacity, the congenital gift, nor is it the effort, the will, the work, which in the intelligence as sway over the energy capable of making it fully efficacious. It is uniquely the desire, that is, the desire for beauty. This desire, given a certain degree of intensity and purity, is the same thing as genius. At all levels it is the same thing as attention. If this were understood, the whole conception of teaching would be quite other than it is. First, one would realize that the intelligence functions only in joy. Intelligence is perhaps even the only one of our faculties to which joy is indispensible. The absence of joy asphyxiates it.
Simone Weil
The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.
Talleyrand
Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade: today it is the reverse.
Joseph Roux
Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing at whatever cost must be attained.
Marie Curie
Demetrius the grammarian finding in the temple of Delphos a knot of philosophers set chatting together, said to them, “Either I am much deceived,or by your cheerful and pleasant countenances, you are engaged in no very deep discourse.” To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarean, replied: “ ’Tis for such as are puzzled about inquiring whether the future tense of the verb Ballo be spelt with adouble L, or that hunt after the derivation of the comparatives Cheirou and Beltiou, and the superlatives Cheiriotou and Beliotou, to knit their brows whilst discoursing of their science; but as to philosophical discourses, they always divert and cheer up those that entertain them, and never deject them or make them sad.
Michel de Montaigne
The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices the soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and impotent striving, a strength that is ceaselessly broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament. The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul. Sweeping up with the waves of those movements, plunging back with them, the heart thus forgets its own failures and finds solace in an intimate harmony between its own sadness and the sea’s sadness, which merges the sea’s destiny with the destinies of all things.
Marcel Proust
The host took care to produce one or another of these whenever the current subjects seemed about used up, so that the conversation gathered new life and at the same time steered clear of political arguments, which are hindersome to both ingestion and digestion.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
[C]hange your thinking, your interpretation of he world, change the way you see! To change the way you see is to change the world. (50)
Jean-Yves Leloup
People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Far from seeking to justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and afflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: 'If a God has made this world, I should not wish to be that God. The world's wretchedness would rend my heart.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive.
Roland Barthes
I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.
Albert Camus
Dictionary: The universe in alphabetical order.
Anatole France
We have no time to waste on insignificant books, hollow books, books that are there to please...We want books that cost their authors a great deal, books where you can feel the years of work, the backache, the writer's block, the author's panic at the thought that he might be lost: his discouragement, his courage, his anguish, his stubbornness, the risk of failure that he has taken.
Laurence Cossé
The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable
Albert Camus
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.", 1657)
Blaise Pascal
When God descends to us he, in a certain sense, abases himself and stammers with us, so He allows us to stammer with Him
John Calvin
If you suppress grief too much it can well redouble.
Molière
To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
Albert Camus
But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.
Marcel Proust
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.", May 16, 1767)
Voltaire
As a remedy against all ills - poverty sickness and melanchol - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work.
Charles Baudelaire
The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way.Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.
Robert Bresson
What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he's certain he'll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?
Voltaire
I don’t understand why you insist on calling yourselves Three Little Piglettes,” Mum groans. “It’s a horrible name.”“We’ll make it beautiful, you’ll see. Or better, we’ll make it powerful.
Clémentine Beauvais
Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The fault I find in our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other everyday, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.
Marcel Proust
Chélan had acted as imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being put off by empty words, but he had neglected to tell him that this habit was a crime in the person of no importance, since every piece of logical reasoning is offensive.
Stendhal
I am dead because I lack desire,I lack desire because I think I possess.I think I possess because I do not try to give.In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing:Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become;In desiring to become, you begin to live.
René Daumal