Quotes by French Authors - Page 111

In the age of ideologies, we must make up our minds about murder. If murder has rational foundations, then our period and we ourselves have significance. If it has no such foundations, then we are plunged into madness there is no way out except to find some significance or to desist.
Albert Camus
You don’t make art out of good intentions.
Gustave Flaubert
Durability is one of the chief elements of strength. Nothing is either loved or feared but that which is likely to endure.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I love my country better than my family but I love humanity better than my country.
François Fénelon
Be like the bird that passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight feels them give way beneath her and yet sings knowing that she hath wings.
Victor Hugo
She admired her passion, knowing that passion is by definition excessive.
Milan Kundera
Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it inflames the great.
Roger de Rabutin de Bussy
I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin
Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that quietly awaits a funeral.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.
Coco Chanel
I am moving the rudder, shifting the course of my life. I have not thought of it this way before, but that is what I am doing. Taking my fate into my own hands, turning dreams into reality. And there is nothing more sacred or precious than that. To choose a direction: but how often do we miss the signposts?
Carol Drinkwater
In our springtime there is no better,there is no worse.Blossoming branches burgeon as the must.Some are long,some are short.'Stay upright.Stay with life.
Cyril Pedrosa
Vassily cleared his throat, probably impatient with Gabriel's bookshelf manners. 'You'll have to excuse me,' Gabriel said, putting back the booklet, 'I have a severe addiction to ink.''Don't we all?' Vassily nodded. 'Thank God we have other addictions to assuage it a little.
Jean-Christophe Valtat
It is more or less a given that nothing is less favorable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms.
André Breton
Prayer unaccompanied by perseverance leads to no result.
John Calvin
When we find that we have been aroused to anger we must call for God's help like the apostles when they were tossed about by the wind and storm on the waters. He will command your passions to cease and there will be a great calm.
Francis de Sales
Oh! To live alone, always alone, in the midst of the crowd that surrounds me, without a word of love ever coming to gladden my soul, without a friendly hand reaching out to me!
Herculine Barbin
Alas! Where love is concerned, self-interested deception is superior to the truth itself, which is why so many men pay so high a price to clever deceivers.
Honoré de Balzac
People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.
Marcel Proust
Have patience with all things but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections but instantly set about remedying them-every day begin the task anew.
Saint Francis de Sales
First of all, time travel per se does not exist. ‘Travel’ implies that you choose both your destination and when you come back. It’s more a ‘time shot,’ a ‘time through.’ But it’s definitely not time travel.
Francis Barel
Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely that man was created in God's image. Either/or: either man was created in God's image - and has intestines! - or God lacks intestines and man is not like him.The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the Great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus "ate and drank, but did not defecate."Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the creator of man.
Milan Kundera
Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.
Albert Camus
Let us reflect, if we wish to be brilliant. Too much improvisation empties the mind in a stupid way. Running beer gathers no froth. No haste, gentlemen.
Victor Hugo
We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die.
Muriel Barbery
To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
Simone de Beauvoir
After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.
Jules de Goncourt
The wisdom of man can only produce works on a human level. Only the Wisdom of God can realize things divine, and it is to divine heights that it destines us.
Father Jacques Philippe
But in the machine of today we forget that motors are whirring: the motor, finally, has come to fulfill its function, which is to whirr as a heart beats - and we give no thought to the beating of our heart. Thus, precisely because it is perfect the machine dissembles its own existence instead of forcing itself upon our notice.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Stars are cracks of light for night than pierces the heart. (Étoiles sont fissures de lumière - De la nuit que transperce le cœur.)
Charles de Leusse
All monsters have their fits of depression.
Rachilde
She was born in the year of our Lord only knows. The years that a woman subtracts from her age are not lost. They are added to other women's.
Diane de Poitiers
The mere ambition to write a poem is enough to kill it.
Henri Michaux
Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more think less and stop watching ourselves live.
Nicolas de Chamfort
Everything is boring, boredom is the other epidemic which is making Europe ripe for decline. Boredom is the end product of each and every civilization. It is the arteriosclerosis of the great thinking peoples. The moment always arrives where even God, whether he’s called Zeus, Zebaoth or Zoroaster, has finished creating the universe and asks: “What’s the point of it, actually?” He yawns and chucks it aside. Mankind does the same with civilization. Boredom is the condition of a people which no longer believes but all the same is doing just fine. Boredom is when every clock in the country is predestined to be correct. When the same naive flowers blossom again in the month of March. When every day the deaths of good family fathers are announced in the papers. When a war breaks out in the Balkans. When poems go on about the stars. Boredom is a symptom of aging. Boredom is the diagnosis that talent and virtue are slowly being spent. Boredom is the life-long determination to a form of being which has worn itself out.
Iwan Goll
Rain on your body burned my heart. (Pluie sur ton corps - Brûla mon coeur.)
Charles de Leusse
All the known world excepting only savage nations is governed by books.
Voltaire
He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.
Anaïs Nin
Let us savour the swift delights of the most beautiful of our days!
Alphonse de Lamartine
Real lives have no end. Real books have no end.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
Eugène Ionesco
It was a time I slept in many rooms, called myself by many names. I wandered through the quarters of the city like alluvium wanders the river banks. I knew every kind of joy, ascents of every hue. Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.
Roman Payne
Nature is not embarrassed by difficulties of analysis. She avoids complication only in means. Nature seems to be proposed to do much with little: it is a principle that the development of physics constantly supports by new evidence.
Jean Fresnel
I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.
Roman Payne
If each of us were to confess his most secret desire the one that inspires all his plans all his actions he would say: "I want to be praised."
E. M. Cioran
The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Wherever you turn, you can find someone who needs you. Even if it is a little thing, do something for which there is no pay but the privilege of doing it. Remember, you don't live in a world all of your own.
Albert Schweitzer
One crime is everything two nothing.
Dorothee Deluzy
A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love
Stendhal
We triumph without glory when we conquer without danger.
Corneille
Affliction compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.
Simone Weil
I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.
Emil M. Cioran
She was sewing together the little proofs of his devotion out of which to make a garment for her tattered love and faith. He cut into the faith with negligent scissors, and she mended and sewed and rewove and patched. He wasted, and threw away, and could not evaluate or preserve, or contain, or keep his treasures. Like his ever torn pockets, everything slipped through and was lost, as he lost gifts, mementos--all the objects from the past. She sewed his pockets that he might keep some of their days together, hold together the key to the house, to their room, to their bed. She sewed the sleeve so he could reach out his arm and hold her, when loneliness dissolved her. She sewed the lining so that the warmth would not seep out of their days together, the soft inner skin of their relationship.
Anaïs Nin
People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things and brings opposites together. Grammar is a wonderful way of organising the world how you'd like it to be.
Delphine de Vigan
When you're suffering, you're oversensitive to everything.
Henri Charrière
The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.
Stendhal
Love is above all else the gift of oneself.
Jean Anouilh
To do all that one is able to do is to be a man to do all that one would like to do is to be a god.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Are the worst enemies of society those who attack it or those who do not even give themselves the trouble of defending it?
Gustave Le Bon