Quotes by French Authors - Page 107

The time of man is coming, and of this I am certain: neither death, nor life, nor the spirits, nor the present, nor the future, nor the stars, nor the abyss, nor any creature: nothing will keep from love those who live in our land, and by our land. The time of man is coming─men who will know the nobility of forests and the grace of trees, men who will know how to contemplate and heal and, lastly, how to love.
Muriel Barbery
Alan! How many more times do I have to tell you? We do not say “see you soon” to customers when they leave our shop. We say “goodbye”, because they won’t be coming back, ever. When will you get that into your thick head?
Jean Teulé
Steam seems to have killed all gratitude in the hearts of sailors.
Jules Verne
Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.This is the obscenity of war: the intimacy of mutually shed blood, the lascivious proximity of two soldiers who, eye to eye, bayonet each other.
Milan Kundera
She blushed and so did he. She greeted him in a faltering voice, and he spoke to her without knowing what he was saying.
Voltaire
A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.
Marcel Proust
She blushed. It is a beautiful thing when a woman blushes; at that instant her body no longer belongs to her; she doesn't control it; she is at its mercy; oh, can there be anything more beautiful than the sight of a woman violated by her own body!
Milan Kundera
If there were no God it would be necessary to invent him.
Voltaire
Determining who the members of your audience are is the most important piece in the business puzzle.
Cendrine Marrouat
No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.
Marcel Proust
Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
Albert Camus
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
As the purse is emptied the heart is filled.
Victor Hugo
For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of the word 'never'. And it's really awful. You say the word a hundred times a day but you don't really know what you're saying until you're faced with a real 'never again'.
Muriel Barbery
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
Emil M. Cioran
Fuck! Is one expected to be a gentleman when one is stiff?
Marquis de Sade
Always carry champagne! In victory You deserve it & in defeat You need it!
Napoléon Bonaparte
The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographicalcan be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery. It has long been said that the desert is monotheistic. Is it illogical or devoid of interest to observe that the district in Paris between Place de la Contrescarpe and Rue de l’Arbalète conduces rather to atheism, to oblivion and to the disorientation of habitual reflexes?
Guy Debord
Things are beautiful if you love them.
Jean Anouilh
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
André Gide
Men from the mountains always dream of the sea, and above all things I love to travel.
Anaïs Nin
Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.
Marguerite Duras
Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, and unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny.
Victor Hugo
I long to see everything to know everything to learn everything!
Marie Bashkirtseff
An event is never just what it is in itself and nothing more. It’s what goes on around it, at the same time, that makes it — potentially — a tragic situation.You have to have been exposed to this, at least once, to understand it.
Jacques Yonnet
There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.
Michel Montaigne
Every suicide is a solution to a problem.
Jean Baechler
For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.
Thérèse de Lisieux
It is not easy to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing to live with its actual relationships.
Albert Memmi
Jealousy is an awkward homage which inferiority renders to merit.
Mme. De Puisieux
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
Jules Renard
He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God's providence to lead him aright
Blaise Pascal
Nothing but courage can guide life.
Luc de Clapiers de Vauvenargues
Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, largerphenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease oftime; life, again, a disease of matter.Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itselfis only an infirmity of God.
Emil M. Cioran
Δύο υπερβολές : ν' αποκλείουμε το Λόγο, και να μη δεχόμαστε παρά μόνο το Λόγο.
Blaise Pascal
But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything’s handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture, the sound, the scenery, the atmospheric music in case you haven’t understood what the director’s on about… The creaking door that tells you to be stiff. You have to imagine it all when you’re reading.
Daniel Pennac
Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.
Voltaire
You never see the old austerity That was the essence of civility Young people hereabouts unbridled now Just want.
Molière
A clock that is moving through space at a very fast speed does not tick at the same rate as a slow-moving watch gently attached to your wrist as you stroll on a tropical beach. The idea of a universal time - a godlike clock that could somehow sit outside our universe and measure, in one go, the movement of everything in it, how its evolution unfolds, how old it is and all that - does not exist.
Christophe Galfard
Vase[Why weep Come back tomorrow There are also poisonous flowers and flowers always open in the evening she loves the cinema she has been in Russia Love married with disdain Pearl-studded watch a trip to Montrouge Maisons- Lafitte and everything finishes in perfumes remember Let the flower bloom and let the fruit rot and let the grain sprout while the storms rage]
Guillaume Apollinaire
Has he written to you?''He writes frequently.''Shew me his letters this instant, I order you'; and M. de Renal added six feet to his stature.
Stendhal
On evenings, I spent the entire study period reading....From that time on, the world began to broaden around me, beyond any tangible limits. The world, as portrayed in those works destined for young people, was divided in two: an ordinary, everyday world, brutal and unresponding to desires, and a spacious, logical world, about all kind, interesting and desirable. Wasn't the very act of reading a pleasure more substantial than that of playing or eating, for instance, even when one was starved?
Joseph Zobel
A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.
Coco Chanel
They clutch and cling and howl when I leave them, but how badly they love.
Anaïs Nin
The only menace is inertia.
St. John Perse
A human being - what is a human being? Everything and nothing. Through the power of thought it can mirror everything it experiences. Through memory and knowledge it becomes a microcosm, carrying the world within itself. A mirror of things, a mirror of facts. Each human being becomes a little universe within the universe!
Guy de Maupassant
No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.
François de La Rochefoucauld
. . . In all parts of our globe, fanatics have cut each other's throats, publicly burnt each other, committed without a scruple and even as a duty, the greatest crimes, and shed torrents of blood . . . Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under divers names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty. We find, in all the religions, 'a God of armies,' a 'jealous God,' an 'avenging God,' a 'destroying God,' a 'God,' who is pleased with carnage, and whom his worshippers consider it a duty to serve. Lambs, bulls, children, men, and women, are sacrificed to him. Zealous servants of this barbarous God think themselves obliged even to offer up themselves as a sacrifice to him. Madmen may everywhere be seen, who, after meditating upon their terrible God, imagine that to please him they must inflict on themselves, the most exquisite torments. The gloomy ideas formed of the deity, far from consoling them, have every where disquieted their minds, and prejudiced follies destructive to happiness.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
All the scholastic scaffolding falls as a ruined edifice before a single word: faith.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares.
Marcel Proust
Amuse yourself, torment your desires. Drink when you're thirsty -- that would be very much too simple! If you didn't harbour a temptation eternally in your soul, you'd run the risk of forgetting yourself.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Lies, so often misleading and which form the substance of all conversations, are less effective in covering up a feeling of dislike or of self-interest, or a visit one would rather people did not know about, or a one-day fling one wants to conceal from one's wife - than a good reputation is in utterly overshadowing disreputable habits.
Marcel Proust
The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film.I don’t want to write anything but takes.
Julio Cortázar
Fear succeeds crime - it is its punishment.
Voltaire
I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness. Skylarks sing in the sunshine, the blue sky, the warm air, in the fresh morning light. The owl flies by night, a dark shadow passing through the darkness; he hoots his sinister, quivering hoot, as though he delights in the intoxicating black immensity of space.
Guy de Maupassant
Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? ... Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.
Milan Kundera
With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness... something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame, annihilate him, with a pleasure never known before.
Anaïs Nin
I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.
Roman Payne
Let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!
Albert Camus
The breath of wind that moved them was still chilly on this day in May; the flowers gently resisted, curling up with a kind of trembling grace and turning their pale stamens towards the ground. The sun shone through them, revealing a pattern of interlacing, delicate blue veins, visible through the opaque petals; this added something alive to the flower's fragility, to it's ethereal quality, something almost human ,in the way that human can mean frailty and endurance both at the same time. The wind could ruffle these ravishing creations but it couldn't destroy them, or even crush them; they swayed there, dreamily; they seemed ready to fall but held fast to their slim strong branches-...
Irène Némirovsky