Quotes by French Authors - Page 117

Can a faith that does nothing be called sincere?
Jean Racine
The thought is a deed. Of all deeds she fertilizes the world most.
Émile Zola
I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
Marcel Duchamp
She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries.
Marcel Proust
In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Oh ParisFrom red to green all the yellow dies awayParis Vancouver Hyeres Maintenon New York and the AntillesThe window opens like an orangeThe beautiful fruit of light("Windows")
Guillaume Apollinaire
What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant...
Victor Hugo
...she robbed me blind, the bitch!...and she's still at it! everyone who's ever done me wrong, robbed me, repudiated me, pillaged me has never suffered...and never will suffer! you could call it their reward!...robbing me brings you good luck!
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
To love and be loved, that is the miracle of youth
Victor Hugo
That is the definition of truth, it is the thing you must not say. “The miracle into which the child and the poet walk” [Tsvetaeva] as if walking home, and home is there…The thing that is both known and unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. Kafka says—one very small line lost in his writing—“to the depths, to the depths.
Hélène Cixous
I want to be justice, love and the wrath of God all in one.
Marjane Satrapi
There are times when you wake at dawn and check your neck for the marks of the vampire, those two little red dots, your pupils still contracted with hate, muscles weary from the struggle.
Marie Darrieussecq
My life will have been a succession of lives, as if I have had several lives, a multiplicity of stories and roles. I have not ceased to have changes of life.
Bernard Stiegler
Never be afraid of opportunities, always be on the lookout for adventures.
Alexandre Dumas
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
Anaïs Nin
Never lend books - nobody ever returns them the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me.
Anatole France
It is not customary to love what one has.
Anatole France
Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
René Descartes
We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace.
Albert Schweitzer
Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it.
Marcel Proust
If we were logical the future would be bleak indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings and we have faith and we have hope and we can work.
Jacques Cousteau
Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.
Milan Kundera
What we mean when we say that something is "cultural" is that it is roughly similar to what we find in other members of the particular group we are considering, and unlike what we would find in members of a contrast group. This is why it is confusing to say that people share a culture, as if culture were common property. We may have strictly identical amounts of money in our respective wallets without sharing any of it!
Pascal Boyer
I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Don’t worry, I’m the business expert here, and when I make my first million, I’m going to sue those werewolves’ asses off,” Priscilla said cheerfully.  “They’ll have no ass left. They’ll be ass-less. They’ll look ridiculous.
St. Clair
There is only one class of men, the privileged class
Albert Camus
Your soulmate can also be your downfall. 
Guillaume Musso
Spanish rain,A maiden’s dress,Apothecary pillsAnd ancient thrills;Melancholy killsA girl’s caress.(—Roman Payne; Valencia, Spain, November 2nd 2012)
Roman Payne
A day came when I should have died,and after than nothing seemed very important, so I stayed as I am, without regret separated from the normal human condition.
Guy Sajer
Think while walking, walk while thinking, and let writing be but the light pause, as the body on a walk rests in contemplation of wide open spaces.
Frédéric Gros
It’s not the light that’s attracting me, but the darkness that’s driving me on.
Julien Torma
Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought.
Stendhal
There are hours for rest, and hours for wakefulness; nights for sobriety and nights for drunkenness—(if only so that possession of the former allows us to discern the latter when we have it; for sad as it is, no human body can be happily drunk all the time).
Roman Payne
The bond between being and non-being can be only internal. It is within being qua being that non-being must arise, and within non-being that being must spring up; and this relation can not be a fact, a natural law, but an upsurge of the being which is its own nothingness of being.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list.
Nicolas Chamfort
Hope is the last thing that dies in man.
François de La Rochefoucauld
To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.
René Descartes
Visions from the gods are gifts alone for those who wander.
Roman Payne
Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.
Victor Hugo
You see, for me a painting is a dramatic action in the course of which the reality finds itself split apart. For me, that dramatic action takes precedence over all other considerations. The pure plastic act is only secondary as far as I'm concerned. What counts is the drama of that plastic art, the moment at which the universe comes out of itself and meets its own destruction.
Françoise Gilot
What you don't know by heart you haven't really loved deeply enough
George Steiner
Respect the man of noble races other than your own, who carries out, in a different place, a combat parallel to yours -- to ours. He is your ally. He is our ally, be he at the other end of the world.Love all living things whose humble task is not opposed in any way to yours, to ours: men with simple hearts, honest, without vanity and malice, and all the animals, because they are beautiful, without exception and without exception indifferent to whatever "idea" there may be. Love them, and you will see the eternal in the glance of their eyes of jet, amber, or emerald. Love also the trees, the plants, the water that runs though the meadow and on to the sea without knowing where it goes; love the mountain, the desert, the forest, the immense sky, full of light or full of clouds; because all these exceed man and reveal the eternal to you.
Savitri Devi
We must never expect discretion in first love: it is accompanied by such excessive joy that unless the joy is allowed to overflow, it will choke you.
Alexandre Dumas
A 'sadist' of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be...
Marcel Proust
…This singular reversal may perhaps proceed from the fact that for us the “subject” (since Christianity) is the one who suffers: where there is a wound, there is a subject: die Wunde! die Wunde! says Parsifal, thereby becoming “himself”; and the deeper the wound, at the body’s center (at the “heart”), the more the subject becomes a subject: for the subject is intimacy (“The wound…is of a frightful intimacy”). Such is love’s wound: a radical chasm (at the “roots” of being), which cannot be closed, and out of which the subject drains, constituting himself as a subject in this very draining.”―from_A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments_. Translated by Richard Howard, p. 189
Roland Barthes
All round there was a rising tide of beer, widow Désir's barrels had all been broached, beer had rounded all paunches and was overflowing in all directions, from noses, eyes - and elsewhere. People were so blown out and higgledy-piggledy, that everybody's elbows or knees were sticking into his neighbour and everybody thought it great fun to feel his neighbour's elbows. All mouths were grinning from ear to ear in continuous laughter.
Émile Zola
All roads lead to Rome but our antagonists think we should choose different paths.
Jean de La Fontaine
The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose not his individuality but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.
Simone Weil
Jealousy isn't a pleasant quality, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it.
Milan Kundera
One can always find hands for a work of destruction.
André Gide
The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but unfortunately our cats have such drooping bellies that this does not apply to them.
Muriel Barbery
It has been my face. It's got older still, or course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine feature have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.
Marguerite Duras
Kindness causes us to learn and to forget many things.
Madame Swetchine
Love reduces the complexity of living. It amazes me that when Henry walks towards the cafe table where I wait for him, or opens the gate to our house, the sight of him is sufficient to exult me. No letter from anyone, even in praise of my book, can stir me as much as a note from him.
Anaïs Nin
Once freedom lights its beacon in a man's heart the gods are powerless against him.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Yes, I do think that not everything from the past is outmoded. Giving yourself a chance to possess something very good, taking your time, that's important. Yes, I think everything goes by too fast these days. We talk too fast. We think too fast -- if we think at all, that is! We send e-mails and texts without reading them through, we lose the elegance of proper spelling, politeness, the sense of things. I've seen children publish pictures of themselves vomiting on Facebook. No, no, i'm not against progress; I'm just afraid it will isolate people even more.
Grégoire Delacourt
When you traveled with company, the country would shrink away; your companion would become the subject of your voyage as much as the country itself. As for group travel, the country would end up being the silent host whose presence one forgets like one does an overly timid guest, the principal subject becoming the backdrop.
Édouard Levé
Bombs and bullets don't discriminate.
Sophie Masson
I have a remarkable memory I forget everything. It is wonderfully convenient. It is as though the world were constantly renewing itself for me.
Jules Renard