Quotes by French Authors - Page 106

Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.
Jacques Prévert
Un sceptique qui adhère à un croyant cela est simple comme la loi des couleurs complémentaires.Ce qui nous manque nous attire.
Victor Hugo
A modest man never talks of himself.
Jean de La Bruyère
Studying wine taught me that there was a very big difference between soil and dirt: dirt is to soul what zombies are to humans. Soil is full of life, while dirt is devoid of it.
Olivier Magny
We do not have feelings which change us, but feelings that suggest to us the idea of change. Thus love does not purge us of selfishness, but makes us aware of it and gives us the idea of a distant country where this selfishness will disappear.
Albert Camus
This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.
Marcel Proust
Genius is personal decided by fate but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.
Le Corbusier
When one wishes to play the wit, he sometimes wanders a little from the truth.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Physicians of the Utmost Fame were called at once but when they came they answered as they took their fees 'There is no cure for this disease.'
Hilaire Belloc
My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out ... in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.
Emil M. Cioran
Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.
André Breton
Even as it clouds our corporeal vision, intoxication clarifies our spiritual vision. The mind, set free from the heavy bondage of the body, flees away like a prisoner whose guard has fallen asleep, leaving the keys at the prison gate.
Gérard de Nerval
True or false, that which is set of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.
Victor Hugo
There is so much sttuborn hope in a human heart.
Albert Camus
There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
Gustave Flaubert
A fool always finds one still more foolish to admire him.
Nicolas Boileau
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
Victor Hugo
Suicide only really frightens those who are never tempted by it and never will be, for its darkness only welcomes those who are predestined to it.
Georges Bernanos
That will be so amusing! You will have five hundred million little bells,and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The effectiveness of work increases according to geometrical progression if there are no interruptions.
André Maurois
But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
We deceive ourselves when we fancy that only weakness needs support. Strength needs it far more.
Anne-Sophie Swetchine
Equilibrium is the state of death, only chaos produces lifeThe Ancient Greeks have been driven to extinction by too much search for architectural harmony.
Stéphane Lupasco
Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.
Gustave Flaubert
What is necessary is never a risk.
Cardinal de Retz
All people have three characters, that which they exhibit, that which they are, and that which they think they are.
Alphonse Karr
Somewhere within the meeting of our eyes, our souls were bonding, even if our day to day lives were far apart.
Carol Drinkwater
These words filled me with a sort of melancholy and I was at a loss for an answer, for I felt when I was with him, when I was talking to him - and no doubt it would have been the same with anyone else - none of that happiness which it was possible for me to experience when I was by myself. Alone, at times, I felt surging from the depths of my being one or other ot those impressions which gave me a delicious sense of well-being. But as soon as I was with someone else, as soon as I was talking to a friend, my mind as it were faced about, it was towards this interlocutor and not towards myself that it directed its thoughts, and when they followed this outward course they brought me no pleasure.
Marcel Proust
I am not afraid... I was born to do this.
Jeanne d'Arc
Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink.
Guy Debord
Time spent with a cat is never wasted.
Colette
...perhaps, also this short embrace may infuse in their veins a little of this thrill which they would not have known without it, and will give to those two dead souls, brought to life in a second, the rapid and divine sensation of this intoxication, of this madness which gives to lovers more happiness in an instant than other men can gather during a whole lifetime.
Guy de Maupassant
Frederick expected that he would have felt spasms of joy; but the passions grow pale when we find ourselves in an altered situation; and, as he no longer saw Madame Arnoux in the environment wherein he had known her, she seemed to him to have lost some of her fascination; to have degenerated in some way that he could not comprehend—in fact, not to be the same. He was astonished at the serenity of his own heart./... sentimentele slăbesc cînd le schimbi locul...
Gustave Flaubert
As she grew older, Maddy discovered that she had disappointed almost everyone. An awkward girl with a sullen mouth, a curtain of hair, and a tendency to slouch, she had neither Mae's sweet nature nor sweet face. Her eyes were rather beautiful, but few people ever noticed this, and it was widely believed Maddy was ugly, a troublemaker, too clever for her own good, too stubborn - or too slack - to change.Of course, folk agreed that it was not her fault she was so brown or her sister so pretty, but a smile costs nothing, as the saying goes, and if only the girl had made an effort once in a while, or even showed a little gratitude for all the help and free advice, then maybe she would have settled down.
Joanne Harris
Where there is power, there is resistance.
Michel Foucault
Arrogance is in everything I do. It is in my gestures, the harshness of my voice, in the glow of my gaze, in my sinewy, tormented face.
Coco Chanel
Here’s one secret no one will tell you about getting laid after a date. DON’T TALK. Most girls blame either their looks or excessive timidity for their virginity. This is only true to an extent. These girls are also horribly annoying.”—Aurelia Nichols & Jillie Bean, 101 Tips to Lose Your Virginity after 25
Camilla Monk
He is among those beings of great scope who spread their leafy branches willingly over broad horizons. To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to know shame at the sight of poverty which is not of our making. It is to be proud of a victory won by our comrades. It is to feel, as we place our stone, that we are contributing to the building of the world.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.
Michel de Montaigne
Swann, with that almost arrogant charity of a man of the world who, amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another's shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly benevolence...
Marcel Proust
Rather suffer than die is man's motto.
Jean de La Fontaine
Not only must the most privileged feel they are brothers and sisters of the most destitute, but the most destitute must feel as well that something within them makes them equal to the greatest sages and geniuses.
Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
Prayer like radium is a luminous and self-generating form of energy.
Dr. Alexis Carrel
It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
Albert Camus
Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.
Marcel Proust
That night I think we were trying to fight against death, against boredom and banality, against everything that made us cry and stare at our futures full in the face with dread. We drank and played games to be in the now, to be in each moment as hard as we could, because the moment was all that mattered, at the end of it all. I remember I felt intoxicated on life and darkness. I felt powerful. It was the most natural thing in the world. This was why we were alive– to be powerful and free.
Laure Eve
Only passions great passions can elevate the soul to great things.
Denis Diderot
It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends
Milan Kundera
Nature a, (ce crains-je) elle mesme attaché à l'homme quelque instinct à l'inhumanité
Michel de Montaigne
The better I get to know men the more I find myself loving dogs.
Charles de Gaulle
Of all public figures and benefactors of mankind, no one is loved by history more than the literary patron. Napoleon was just a general of forgotten battles compared with the queen who paid for Shakespeare's meals and beer in the tavern. The statesman who in his time freed the slaves, even he has a few enemies in posterity, whereas the literary patron has none. We thank Gaius Maecenas for the nobility of soul we attribute to Virgil; but he isn’t blamed for the selfishness and egocentricity that the poet possessed. The patron creates 'literature through altruism,' something not even the greatest genius can do with a pen.
Roman Payne
Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one's eyes, of the various events of one's life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables ones to resuscitate dead recollections, but even then, there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable.
Marcel Proust
At the street corner, a one-storey house built of freestone, but repulsively decrepit and filthy, seemed to command the entrance, like a gaol. And here, indeed, lived La Méchain, like a vigilant proprietess, ever on the watch, exploiting in person her little population of starving tenants.
Émile Zola
All the joys—animal and human—of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary. I am entering into the truth, into nature.
Paul Gauguin
The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages.
Cyrano de Bergerac
Contemporary consciousness is no longer equipped to deal with our mortality. Never in any other time, or any other civilization, have people thought so much or so contantly about aging. Each individual has a simple view of the future: a time will come when the sum of pleasures that life has left to offer is outweighed by the sum of pain (one can actually feel the meter ticking, and it ticks always in the same direction). This weighing up of pleasure and pain, which everyone is forced to make sooner or later, leads logically, at a certain age, to suicide.
Michel Houellebecq
The dream of poor Bazin had always been to serve a man of the cloth.
Alexandre Dumas
Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn - and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb.So, let us drink a cup of tea.
Muriel Barbery
To fight adversity, to improvise, to solve problems, and to save the coup, I had gathered all my senses into unusual configurations, which made me grow wild and enhanced my perceptions.
Philippe Petit
[T]he world we live in is governed by the most revolting bunch of crooks ever to defile the soil of this planet... [You] must never take them seriously, which is exactly what they want.
Albert Cossery