Quotes by French Authors - Page 109

The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
Marcel Proust
To everyone in the foyer reading the lists, or on the sidewalks waving signs and photos of their families who’d disappeared, I said over and over again: “Everyone is dead.” If they insisted, showing me family photos, I’d calmly say: “Were there any children? Not a single child will come back.” I didn’t mince my words, I didn’t try to spare their feelings, I was used to death. I’d become as hard-hearted as the deportees who saw us arrive at Birkenau without saying a single comforting word. Surviving makes other people’s tears unbearable. You might drown in them.
Marceline Loridan-Ivens
The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.
Roland Barthes
So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, once my bad temper is exhausted, I have no language left at all: the world is not "unreal" (I could then utter it: there are arts of the unreal, among them the greatest arts of all), but disreal: reality has fled from it, is nowhere, so that I no longer have any meaning (any paradigm) available to me; *I do not manage* to define my relations with Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, the Piazza del Popolo. What relation can I have with a system of power if I am neither its slave nor its accomplice nor its witness." —from_A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_
Roland Barthes
The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democracy, from beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,-Wait and hope.
Alexandre Dumas
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
Roland Barthes
There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed, or of some duty to be performed. All that takes place within us, around us, or through us, contains and conceals His divine action.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade
Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.
Rémy de Gourmont
Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.
Albert Camus
The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.
Jacques Derrida
If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring.
Georges Bataille
Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.
Voltaire
Frames 221 to 223: The motorcade is now in front of the camera lens, moving ever so slowly. The President and First Lady are waving to the crowd. The President almost stands up to send kisses to a few ladies in the front rows, but the First Lady holds him by the arm. The President sits back comfortably in his Lincoln. He is enjoying himself terribly.
Francis Barel
I've been 40 years discovering that the Queen of all colours is black.
Auguste Renoir
We have come from all the countries of the world and are going to Saintes-Maries de la Mer. Nomads of the enigma, we gather there each year after having carried our mystery through ordinary countryside and fluid towns. Since we become transformed by our wanderings we are despised by those who stand still and retain a memory of giant serpents and metallic green.
Raymond Queneau
...luck is not to be coerced.
Albert Camus
Men's freedom is their unfaithfulness: the Son of Heaven or the son of a peasant, they could both reduce me to the mediocre torments of a woman.
Shan Sa
Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It's a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in a place where you would not have expected to find it.
Gustave Flaubert
But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
Milan Kundera
When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep's: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster.
Maurice Blanchot
The surplus of the heart overflows from a smile. (Le surplus du coeur - Déborde d'un sourire)
Charles de Leusse
Where are the men?” the little prince at last took up the conversationagain. “It is a little lonely in the desert. . . ”“It is also lonely among men,” the snake said.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Courage is a virtue only so far as it is directed by prudence.
Francois de Fenelon
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
Roland Barthes
The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.... That’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.
Jean Baudrillard
I have seen so many lands vanish in my wake, torn down like stage sets. What survives of them? An image as fleeting as a dream: whatever beauties I discovered, I already knew by heart.
Gérard de Nerval
I was delighted to see you again, and forgot for the moment that all happiness is fleeting.
Alexandre Dumas
If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy.
Marquis De Lafayette
Confidence in others' honesty is no light testimony of one's own integrity.
Michel de Montaigne
It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by [city practitioners', everyday citizens'] blindness. The neworks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.
Michel de Certeau
All for one one for all.
Alexander Dumas
After all, she is lucky. I have been much too calm these past three years. I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity. I leave.
Jean-Paul Sartre
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Dreams rise in the darkness and catch fire from the mirage of moving light. What happens on the screen isn't quite real; it leaves open a vague cloudy space for the poor, for dreams and the dead. Hurry hurry, cram yourself full of dreams to carry you through the life that's waiting for you outside, when you leave here, to help you last a few days more in that nightmare of things and people. Among the dreams, choose the ones most likely to warm your soul.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
This time, there’s no question of freeing yourself from artifice to taste simple joys. Instead there is the promise of meeting a freedom head-on as an outer limit of the self and of the human, an internal overflowing of a rebellious Nature that goes beyond you. Walking can provoke these excesses: surfeits of fatigue that make the mind wander, abundances of beauty that turn the soul over, excesses of drunkenness on the peaks, the high passes (where the body explodes). Walking ends by awakening this rebellious, archaic part of us: our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired. Because walking puts us on the vertical axis of life: swept along by the torrent that rushes just beneath us. What I mean is that by walking you are not going to meet yourself. By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologists’ consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.
Frédéric Gros
The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.
Albert Camus
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Paul Gauguin
The champions of liberty have the medal for any necklace. (Les champions de la liberte - Ont la médaille pour tout collier)
Charles de Leusse
Old age is that night of life as night is the old age of day. Still night is full of magnificence and for many it is more brilliant than the day.
Anne-Sophie Swetchine
Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it." Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.
Gaston Bachelard
We can be friends. We can be anything we want to be.
Muriel Barbery
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardor of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary’s force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness.
Michel de Montaigne
Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end nearer and that joyous watchwords like "forward" and "farther" are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it. (If fascination with the word "forward" has become universal, isn't it mainly because death is already speaking to us from nearby?)
Milan Kundera
What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion.
Victor Hugo
A strange girl, all phosphorous and cantharides, burning with every desire! And burning with every vice!
Jean Lorrain
There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy.
Jean Anouilh
Causing any damage or harm to one party in order to help another party is not justice, and likewise, attacking all feminine conduct [in order to warn men away from individual women who are deceitful] is contrary to the truth, just as I will show you with a hypothetical case. Let us suppose they did this intending to draw fools away from foolishness. It would be as if I attacked fire -- a very good and necessary element nevertheless -- because some people burnt themselves, or water because someone drowned. The same can be said of all good things which can be used well or used badly. But one must not attack them if fools abuse them.
Christine de Pizan
I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room
Gustave Flaubert
Miseries of a birth.
Roland Barthes
To have a solid foundation of skepticism, -that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life.
Rémy de Gourmont
Who taught you all this, doctor?"The reply came promptly:"Suffering.
Albert Camus
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
Albert Camus
The golden era of the golden number was the Italian renaissance. The expression divine proportion was coined by the great mathematician Luca Pacioli in his book 'De divina proportione', written in 1509.
Midhat Gazale
We pay a heavy, very heavy price for the superhuman dignity of our calling. The ridiculous is always so near to the sublime. And the world, usually so indulgent to foibles, hates ours instinctively.
Georges Bernanos
Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
Milan Kundera
Later he´ll be drunk in extremis and will only be able to speak the esperanto of alcoholics, which is a language full of stutterings from the geological layers of our animal ancestors
Anaïs Nin
Unfortunates, who ought to begin with God, do not have any hope in him till they have exhausted all other means of deliverance.
Alexandre Dumas