Quotes by French Authors - Page 110

What I cannot love, I overlook.
Anaïs Nin
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
Anaïs Nin
The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair.
Molière
We need to get acquainted with mediocrity to notice greatness.
Olivier Magny
... Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth...
Marcel Proust
We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that he does not exist, since we have not reached the point where God exists.
Simone Weil
You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one's wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world—in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his own morality, the realism of conquests.
Albert Camus
Ought we not to love dearly the neighbor, who truly represents to us the sacred Person of our Master? And is this not one of the most powerful motives we could have for loving each other with an ardently burning love?
Francis de Sales
It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.
Anatole France
Nothing brings on jealousy like laughter.
Françoise Sagan
I'm a mess right now I can't eat can't sleepBills are piling high ain't worked in three weeksAin't bathed can't shave cause my heart is so tender like living in a blenderI'm shaken and I'm stirred
Anthony Hamilton
He was a six and a half foot scowl.(on Rachmaninov)
Igor Stravinsky
Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
Charles de Gaulle
To be enlightened is to know oneself and not run away.
Veronique Vienne
To arms! to arms! ye brave! The avenging sword unsheathe March on! march on! all hearts resolved On victory or death!
Rouget de Lisle
All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.
Michel de Montaigne
When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from above?
Gustave Flaubert
[…] there exists around the written world opened by the work a multitude of other possible worlds, which we can complete by means of our images and our words. Denying oneself this work of completion in the name of some hypothetical fidelity to the work is bound to fail: we can indeed reject filling these gaps in a conscious way, but we cannot prevent our unconscious from finishing the work, according to its priorities and those of the era in which it was written.
Pierre Bayard
Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.
Marcel Proust
This is what’s happening: together we are descending the stairs of the heart, which lead to the sources. (It is a secret staircase. I knew it existed. Which is why I avoided it. Because it leads to the other-life, deep, underground, the fluvial, the painful.)We are in the process of descending into the depths of the heart. To where bodies communicate with each other.
Hélène Cixous
I Drink. I Burn. I Dream.And Sometimes, I tell Stories !
Hélène Cixous
Have you strayed from the path leading to heaven? Then call on Mary, for her name means "Star of the Sea, the North Star which guides the ships of our souls during the voyage of this life," and she will guide you to the harbor of eternal salvation.
St. Louis de Montfort
This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
Albert Camus
Meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree. It completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are.
Matthieu Ricard
Without duty life is soft and bone less.
Joseph Joubert
Man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.
John Calvin
Nature alone can lead to the understanding of art, just as art brings us back to nature with greater awarness. It is the source of all beauty, since it is the source of all life.
Eugène Carrière
The head is always the dupe of the heart.
La Rochefoucauld
The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book.
Stéphane Mallarmé
History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.
Voltaire
She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price.
Dai Sijie
The first step my son which one makes in the world is the one on which depends the rest of our days.
Voltaire
It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice.
Emil M. Cioran
Much misconstruction and bitterness are spared to him who thinks naturally upon what he owes to others rather than on what he ought to expect from them.
Elizabeth de Meulan Guizot
What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!
Victor Hugo
It is commonly seen by experience that excellent memories do often accompany weak judgements.
Michel de Montaigne
I ate and read my book, this particular kind of fantasy novel that I secretly loved. It was my favorite thing to do– eat and read. The world just shut up for a while.
Laure Eve
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and as if by magic we see a new meaning in it.
Anaïs Nin
The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.
Jean-Paul Kauffmann
What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure.
Milan Kundera
The birthing wolf,Her heart fed with tenderness,Gave forth from ripe brown nipples,Food to feed the universe.
Roman Payne
The destruction of sight, wherever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colours are affected in the first place, and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplified, being reduced to four andsoon to two colours; finally a grey monochrome stage is reached, although the pathological colour is never identifiable with any normal one. Thus in central as in peripheral lesions ‘the loss of nervous substance results not only in a deficiency of certain qualities, but in the change to a less differentiated and more primitive structure’.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
False happiness renders men stern and proud and that happiness is never communicated. True happiness renders kind and sensible and that happiness is always shared.
Charles de Montesquieu
For a time, then, we stay. For a time. Till the changes.
Joanne Harris
Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.
Jacques Lacan
Ephemeral spectator of an eternal spectacle, man raises for a second his eyes to Heaven, and closes them for ever; but, during that rapid second that is granted to him, from all the quarters of Heaven, and from the outer limits of the Universe, a consoling ray darts from each world and meets his eyes, to announce to him that some connection exists between him and infinity, and that even he is linked to eternity.
Xavier de Maistre
At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.
André Breton
Those who had fought for what they called the revolution maintained a great pride: the pride of being on the correct side of the front lines. Ten or twelve years later (around the time of our story) the front lines began to melt away, and with them the correct side. No wonder the former supporters of the revolution feel cheated and are quick to seek substitute fronts; thanks to religion they can (in their role as atheists struggling against believers) stand again on the correct side and retain their habitual and precious sense of their own superiority.But to tell the truth, the substitute front was also useful to others, and it will perhaps not be too premature to disclose that Alice was one of them. Just as the directress wanted to be on the correct side, Alice wanted to be on the opposite side. During the revolution they had nationalized her papa's shop, and Alice hated those who had done this to him. But how should she show her hatred? Perhaps by taking a knife and avenging her father? But this sort of thing is not the custom in Bohemia. Alice had a better means for expressing her opposition: she began to believe in God.
Milan Kundera
I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.
Georges Duhamel
The institution of monarchy developed during the Middle Ages against the backdrop of the previously endemic struggles between feudal power agencies. The monarchy presented itself as a referee, aa power capable of putting an end to war, violence, and pillage and saying no to these struggles and private feuds. It made itself acceptable by allocating itself a juridical and negative function, albeit one whose limits it naturally began at once to overstep.
Michel Foucault
You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.
Gustave Flaubert
One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.
Igor Stravinsky
Morality consists in this for each individual: to attempt each time to extend its region of clear expression, to try to augment its amplitude, so as to produce a free act that expresses the most possible in one given condition or another. -- Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 73
Gilles Deleuze
...those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art.
Gustave Flaubert
Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
Milan Kundera
In everything one must consider the end.
Jean de La Fontaine
Just as teardrops, when they are large and round and compassionate, can leave a long strand washed clean of discord, the summer rain as it washes away the motionless dust can bring to a person's soul something like endless breathing.
Muriel Barbery
What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.
André Gide
I have no ideas, myself! Not a one! there's nothing more vulgar, more common, more disgusting than ideas! libraries are loaded with them! and every sidewalk cafe!...the impotent are bloated with ideas!...they dazzle youth with ideas! they play the pimp!...and youth is ever ready, as you know, Professor, to gobble up anything, to go OOH! and AAH! by the numbers! How those pimps have an easy job of it! the passionate years of youth are spent getting a hard on and gargling ideeaas!...philosophies, if you prefer!...yes sir, philosophies! youth loves sham just as young dogs love those sticks, like bones, that we throw and they run after! they race forward, yipping away, wasting their time, that's the main thing!
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.
Rémy de Gourmont