Quotes by French Authors - Page 115

... sterile, splendid torture of understanding and loving...
Marcel Proust
If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?
Voltaire
The torment of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be avoided. It is sometimes better to abandon one's self to destiny.
Napoléon Bonaparte
In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual's right to self-defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder — is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?
Frédéric Bastiat
People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I wantto vomit—and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre
Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.
Anatole France
Our true wisdom is to embrace with meek docility, and without reservation, whatever the holy scriptures have delivered.
John Calvin
We have nothing to fear but fear itself
Michel de Montaigne
What moralists describe as the mysteries of the human heart are solely the deceiving thoughts, the spontaneous impulses of self-regard. The sudden changes in character, about which so much has been said, are instinctive calculations for the furtherance of our own pleasures. Seeing himself now in his fine clothes, his new gloves and shoes, Eugène de Rastignac forgot his noble resolve. Youth, when it swerves toward wrong, dares not look in the mirror of conscience; maturity has already seen itself there. That is the whole difference between the two phases of life.
Honoré de Balzac
With guilt there arises indeed a sort of demand which can be called scrupulosity and whose ambiguous character is extremely interesting. A scrupulous consciousness is a delicate consciousness, a precise consciousness, enamored of increasing perfection... This atomization of the law into a multitude of commandments entails an endless 'juridization' of action and a quasi-obsessional ritualization of daily life... With it we enter into the hell of guilt, such as St. Paul described it: the law itself becomes a source of sin.
Paul Ricœur
People will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went aboutpretending to rouse from its slumber a sexuality which every­thing-our discourses, our customs, our institutions, our regulations, our knowledges-was busy producing in the light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment.
Michel Foucault
We only do well the things we like doing.
Colette
Consider this: when you stand at the entry to a steel factory, you can make out through the smoke some men, some metal, the fires. The furnaces roar, the hammers crash; and the metalworkers who forge ingots, weapons, tools, and so on are completely ignorant of the real uses to which their products will be put. The workers can only refer to their products by conventional names. Well, that's where we all stand, all of us! Nobody can see the real character of what he creates because every knife blade may become a dagger, and the use to which an object is put changes both its name and its nature. Only our ignorance shields us from terrible responsibilities.
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that's exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours digging a tunnel to enter the strongroom of a bank. He emerges face to face with hundreds of strongboxes, all identical, and opens them one by one. And each time a box is opened, it loses its anonymity and becomes unique: one is filled with paintings, another with a bundle of banknotes, a third with jewels or letters tied in ribbon, engravings, objects of no value at all, silverware, photos, gold sovereigns, dried flowers, files of paper, crystal glasses, or children’s toys--and so on. There is something intoxicating about opening a new one, finding its contents and feeling overjoyed that in a trice one is no longer in front of a set of boxes, but in the presence of the riches and wretched banalities that make up human existence.
Jacques Bonnet
Speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.
Gustave Flaubert
To accomplish great things, we must not only act but also dream, not only plan, but also believe!
Anatole France
So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbors. The citizen of the universe would be the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.
Voltaire
There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.
Albert Camus
Therein lies the new hope—Justice, after eighteen hundred years of impotent Charity. Ah! in a thousand years from now, when Catholicism will be naught but a very ancient superstition of the past, how amazed men will be to think that their ancestors were able to endure that religion of torture and nihility!
Émile Zola
I think therefore I am.
René Descartes
An effort was made to spread this new materialist atheism with its Communist consequence "by the sword" (as the metaphor goes), that is, by the invasion of neighboring countries with consequent further massacres and the extension of the area of despotic Soviet control... This armed attempt at expansion was checked by Catholic Poland, the most immediately exposed victim, in what has been called "one of the decisive battles of the world.
Hilaire Belloc
. But itis obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is preciselylife that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis.To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive.
Albert Camus
In bed we laugh in bed we cry And born in bed in bed we die The near approach a bed may show Of human bliss to human woe.
Isaac De Benserade
I was convinced that I would be, that I was already, one in a million.
Simone de Beauvoir
Lust is the source of all our actions, and humanity.
Blaise Pascal
Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?
Émile Zola
A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.
Marcel Proust
It is because the will has no power to bring about salvation that the idea of secular morality is an absurdity. What is called morality only depends on the will in what is, so to speak, its most muscular aspect. Religion on the contrary corresponds to desire, and it is desire that saves...To long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save.
Simone Weil
Who can believe that there is no soul behind those luminous eyes?
Théophile Gautier
Look, de Mazel, you've known him for years - hasn't he been known to sleep for forty hours in two days?' 'Forty hours?' 'Certainly. He awoke at meal times, just to take nourishment, and afterwards fell again into his torpor. And Freneuse had a strange horror of sleep; there was some abnormal phenomenon associated with it, some lesion of the brain or neurotic depression.''The troublesome cerebral anaemia which results from excessive debauchery. Another myth! I've never believed, myself, in the supposed debauchery of that poor gentleman. Such a frail chap, with such a delicate complexion! Quite frankly, there was no scope in him for debauchery.'Pooh! About as much as Lorenzaccio!''You associate him with the Medicis! Lorenzaccio was a Florentine impassioned by rancour, a man of energy slowly brooding over his vengeance, caressing it as he might caress the blade of a dagger! There is not the slightest comparison to be drawn between Lorenzaccio and that gall-green, liverish creature Freneuse.
Jean Lorrain
I have been very happy very rich very beautiful much adulated very famous and very unhappy.
Brigitte Bardot
It's a small thing, a life.
Antoine Leiris
Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance...
Edgar Degas
Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
Simone Weil
The world is a good judge of things, for it is in natural ignorance, which is man's true state. The sciences have two extremes which meet. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great intellects, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same ignorance from which they set out; but this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself. Those between the two, who have departed from natural ignorance and not been able to reach the other, have some smattering of this vain knowledge and pretend to be wise. These trouble the world and are bad judges of everything. The people and the wise constitute the world; these despise it, and are despised. They judge badly of everything, and the world judges rightly of them.
Blaise Pascal
The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.
Julio Cortázar
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
It is possible that these millions of suns, along with thousands of millions more we cannot see, make up altogether but a globule of blood or lymph in the veins of an animal, of a minute insect, hatched in a world of whose vastness we can frame no conception, but which nevertheless would itself, in proportion to some other world, be no more than a speck of dust.
Anatole France
It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.
René Descartes
People stop thinking when they cease to read.
Denis Diderot
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
Camille Pissarro
When I returned to partial life my face was wet with tears. How long that state of insensibility had lasted I cannot say. I had no means now of taking account of time. Never was solitude equal to this, never had any living being been so utterly forsaken.
Jules Verne
I can never look at these apparent contradictions between the great laws of nature without a feeling of physical uneasiness which amounts to suffering. Were mankind reduced to the necessity of choosing between two parties, one of whom injures his interest, and the other his conscience, we should have nothing to hope from the future. Happily, this is not the case; and to see Aristus regain his economical superiority, as well as his moral superiority, it is sufficient to understand this consoling maxim, which is no less true from having a paradoxical appearance, “To save is to spend.
Frédéric Bastiat
War is a series of catastrophes that results in victory.
Georges Clémenceau
We can be knowledgeable with another man's knowledge, but we can't be wise with another man's wisdom.
Michel de Montaigne
The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or to wretchedness.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I pray like a robber asking alms at the door of a farmhouse to which he is ready to set fire.
Léon Bloy
Madame Thenardier was approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman...
Victor Hugo
In the black chaos where the seas and the skies become confused let the projectors blow their white trumpets of silence("Roundness")
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.
Marquis De Lafayette
Wine is the refined jewel that only a grown woman will prefer to the sparkling trinkets adored by little girls.
Muriel Barbery
Doctors of ancient times used to recommend reading to their patients as a physical exercise on an equal level as walking, running, or ball-playing.
Jean Leclercq
Never admit defeat!
Arthur Rimbaud
There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.
Michel Montaigne
If you press me to say why I loved him I can say no more than it was because he was he and I was 1.
Michel de Montaigne
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
Jean Cocteau
Everything I see reminds me that in a few days I shall no longer see it... It's horrible... I shall see nothing more... nothing of what exists... the smallest objects that we use... glasses... plates... beds where people sleep so comfortably... carriages. It's so lovely, going out in a carriage, in the evening... How much I enjoyed all that!
Guy de Maupassant
Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts florish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any expirienced in a town when it is under siege.
Voltaire
Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures.
Alexandre Dumas
Increased responsibility for babies and young children has proved just as restrictive, if not more so, than sexism in the home or in the workplace.
Élisabeth Badinter