Quotes by French Authors - Page 119

If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale ... we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of conquerors'.
Simone Weil
How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more
Milan Kundera
A mans life is interesting primarily when he has failed. I well know. For its a sign that he tried to surpass himself.
Georges Clémenceau
The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to live with purpose.
Michel de Montaigne
Nothing is born, nothing dies.
Antoine Lavoisier
Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the more impossible it is to leave him except by sudden flight: a fugitive precisely because a queen.
Marcel Proust
It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil.
Marcel Proust
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
Marcel Proust
I understood that the law of the world was strife; an inexorable, murderous law, which was not content with arming nation against nation but which hurled against one another the children of the same race, the same family, the same womb. I found none of the lofty abstractions of honor, justice, charity, patriotism of which our standard books are so full, on which we are brought up, with which we are lulled to sleep, through which they hypnotize us in order the better to deceive the kind little folk, to enslave them the more easily, to butcher them the more foully.
Octave Mirbeau
A man may beg, but a woman has to sell.
Victor Hugo
Oh what a valiant faculty is hope.
Michel de Montaigne
Valérie: "You know, you don't need to be a lesbian to be a feminist. Nor do you need short hair to be a lesbian. Or a feminist.""Yes, but helps, doesd't it?" Astrid counters
Clémentine Beauvais
The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us.
Voltaire
The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.
Molière
I imagine the feelings of two people meeting after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't, have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect.
Milan Kundera
On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.
Michel de Montaigne
To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.
Marcel Duchamp
If you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent them from growing.
Coco Chanel
Fear follows crime and is its punishment.
Voltaire
Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.
Arthur Rimbaud
Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds to that prudent concern. It is all radiance gigantic loss of heat and light, flame, explosion; but remote from men, who can enjoy in safety and quiet the fruits of this cataclysm. To earth belongs the solidity which sustains houses of stone and the steps of men (at least on its surface, for buried within the depths of the earth is the incandescence of lava).
Georges Bataille
Old age is a time of humiliations the most disagreeable of which for me is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.
Igor Stravinsky
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
Roland Barthes
Let education kindle only those which are truly beneficialto the human species; let it favour those alone which are really necessary to the maintenance of society. The passions of man are dangerous, only because every thing conspires to give them an evil direction.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.
Gustave Flaubert
Good books do not waste our time as most people do... collect a great quantity of books, build alibrary worthy of your noble soul, andspend without stint all the money necessary for it.
Cardinal Augustin Valier
Walking causes a repetitive, spontaneous poetry to rise naturally to the lips, words as simple as the sound of footsteps on the road. There also seems to be an echo of walking in the practice of two choruses singing a psalm in alternate verses, each on a single note, a practice that makes it possible to chant and listen by turns. Its main effect is one of repetition and alternation that St Ambrose compared to the sound of the sea: when a gentle surf is breaking quietly on the shore the regularity of the sound doesn’t break the silence, but structures it and renders it audible. Psalmody in the same way, in the to-and-fro of alternating responses, produces (Ambrose said) a happy tranquillity in the soul. The echoing chants, the ebb and flow of waves recall the alternating movement of walking legs: not to shatter but to make the world’s presence palpable and keep time with it. And just as Claudel said that sound renders silence accessible and useful, it ought to be said that walking renders presence accessible and useful.
Frédéric Gros
Besides, we feel always a sort of mental superiority over those whose lives we know better than they suppose.
Alexandre Dumas
Men still have everything to say about their sexuality, and everything to write. For what they have said so far, for the most part, stems from the opposition activity/passivity, from the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meantto invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of woman as a “darkcontinent” to penetrate and to “pacify.” (We know what “pacify” means in terms ofscotomizing the other and misrecognizing the self.) Conquering her, they’ve madehaste to depart from her borders, to get out of sight, out of body. The way man hasof getting out of himself and into her whom he takes not for the other but for hisown, deprives him, he knows, of his own bodily territory. One can understandhow man, confusing himself with his penis and rushing in for the attack, mightfeel resentment and fear of being “taken” by the woman, of being lost in her,absorbed, or alone.
Hélène Cixous
All happiness depends on courage and work.
Honoré de Balzac
When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women
Gustave Flaubert
The equality prescribed by the Revolution is simply the weak man's revenge upon the strong; it's just what we saw in the past, but in reverse; that everyone should have his turn is only meet. And it shall be turnabout again tomorrow, for nothing in Nature is stable and the governments men direct are bound to prove as changeable and ephemeral as they.
Marquis de Sade
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
Anaïs Nin
The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.
Pierre Bourdieu
In vain a zealous evangelist with a fely hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: 'God is great and good. Come unto Him.' On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God.
Albert Camus
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
Gaston Bachelard
Pleasure can be supported by an illusion, but happiness rests upon truth.
Nicolas Chamfort
Truly it is a blessed thing to love on earth as we hope to love in Heaven, and to begin that friendship here which is to endure for ever there.
Francis de Sales
Science often progresses by carving out new distinctions that refine the fuzzy categories of natural language.
Stanislas Dehaene
There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all. For any given reader, however dedicated he might be, such total abstention necessarily holds true for virtually everything that has been published, and thus in fact this constitutes our primary way of relating to books. We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist.
Pierre Bayard
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
Roland Barthes
As his hands fell upon the keyboard, it was still possible to believe a beautiful harmony had been formed at random, in spite of him. But a second later the music came surging out, the power of it sweeping away all doubts, voices, sounds, wiping away the fixed grins and exchanged glances, pushing back the walls, dispersing the light of the reception room out into the nocturnal immensity of the sky beyond the windows.He did not feel as if he were playing. He was advancing through a night, breathing in its delicate transparency, made up as it was of an infinite number of facets of ice, of leaves, of wind. He no longer felt any pain. No fear about what would happen. No anguish or remorse. The night through which he was advancing expressed this pain, this fear, and the irremediable shattering of the past, but this had all become music and now only existed through its beauty.
Andreï Makine
In life, more than in anything else, it isn’t easy to end up alive.
Roman Payne
It requires more courage to suffer than to die.
Napoleon
But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others...Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this, this is forever.
Irène Némirovsky
Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.
Albert Camus
It is easier for a woman to defend her virtue against men than her reputation against women.
Rochebrune
With audacity one can undertake anything.
Napoléon Bonaparte
We have all of us sufficient fortitude to bear the misfortunes of others.
La Rochefoucauld
On the outside one is a star. But in reality one is completely alone doubting everything. To experience this loneliness of soul is the hardest thing in the world.
Brigitte Bardot
All that I desire in life are three...A wilderness: A beach on the sun-drenched sea,A puff of opium,And thee.
Roman Payne
Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.
Honoré de Balzac
The beauty of the twentieth century is the charm of the hospital, the grace of the cemetery, of consumption and emaciation. I admit that I have submitted to it all; worse, I have loved with all my heart.
Jean Lorrain
Love consists of not looking each other in the eye, but of looking outwardly in the same direction.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I have at least the whole of my life to answer a question: Who am I? And who is the other? A gust of wind at dawn? A motionless landscape? A trembling leaf? A coil of white smoke above a mountain? I write all these words and I hear the wind, not outside, but inside my head. A strong wind, it rattles the shutters through which I enter the dream.
Tahar ben Jelloun
The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Presently, one after another, like shyly hopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow.
Marcel Proust
We should fix ourselves firmly in the presence of God by conversing all the time with Him...we should feed our soul with a lofty conception of God and from that derive great joy in being his. We should put life in our faith. We should give ourselves utterly to God in pure abandonment, in temporal and spiritual matters alike, and find contentment in the doing of His will,whether he takes us through sufferings or consolations.
Brother Lawrence
The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal it's dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out.
Georges Bataille
In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.
Michel Foucault