Quotes by French Authors - Page 121

Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.
Marguerite Duras
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Anaïs Nin
Adrijene, nemoj da se duriš!Vrati se!U redu grešila samduge godine nisam se vracala kuci,ali sam ti uvek krilada je to zato što sam bila u zatvoru!Grešila sam priznajemcesto sam tukla psa,ali sam te volela!Adrijene, nemoj da se duriš!Vrati se!
Jacques Prévert
It was the first time I saw the look on the face of the people I robbed: it was ugly. I was the cause of such ugliness, and the only thing that made me feel was a cruel pleasure which, I thought, was bound to transfigure my own face, to make me resplendent. I was then 23 years old. From that moment on, I felt capable of advancing in cruelty.
Jean Genet
I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
Albert Schweitzer
Life is denied by lack of attention whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.
Nadia Boulanger
Success is most often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.
Coco Chanel
We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening.
Marcel Proust
To fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly.
Hélène Cixous
The looming storm broke in the end. And it is the storm I will remember, the sound of the downpour splattering over the steps of the Tuileries, the dark sky and the pink lightning. I could have stayed like that for centuries.
Hélène Berr
Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge its life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shall come later on.
Victor Hugo
How characteristic of your perverse heart that longs only for what happens to be out of reach.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
The word "avant-garde," for example, despite its note of impartiality, generally serves to dismiss-as though by a shrug of the shoulders-any work that risks giving a bad conscience to the literature of mass consumption.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Mystery of love is like digging water: everything closes. (Mystère de l'amour est comme - Creuser l'eau : tout se referme)
Charles de Leusse
Cowards excuse themselves by the children. Heroes excuse the children. (Les lâches s'excusent par les enfants. - Les héros excusent les enfants.)
Charles de Leusse
Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.
Victor Hugo
In all well-organised brains, the predominating idea—and there always is one—is sure to be the last thought before sleeping, and the first upon waking in the morning. Andrea had scarcely opened his eyes when his predominating idea presented itself, and whispered in his ear that he had slept too long.
Alexandre Dumas
Moreover, the sciences are monuments devoted to the public good; each citizen owes to them a tribute proportional to his talents. While the great men, carried to the summit of the edifice, draw and put up the higher floors, the ordinary artists scattered in the lower floors, or hidden in the obscurity of the foundations, must only seek to improve what cleverer hands have created.
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
There are few chaste women who are not tired of their trade.
La Rochefoucauld
The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to know how to live to purpose.
Michel de Montaigne
What is a Wanderess? Bound by no boundaries, contained by no countries, tamed by no time, she is the force of nature’s course.
Roman Payne
He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it.
Anaïs Nin
There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves. If one pays attention with this intention, fifteen minutes of attention is worth a lot of good works.
Simone Weil
If, when stung by slander or ill-nature, we wax proud and swell with anger, it is a proof that our gentleness and humility are unreal, and mere artificial show.
Francis de Sales
The key to the scientist's purpose is the idea that every phenomenon is the product of a certain given set of condition. In his laboratory he hopes to reconstitute the set of conditions, however complex they may be, which, once they are fully reconstituted, cannot fail to give rise to the phenomenon he is after, life. In other words he seeks to start off a mechanically fated chain-reaction; and of course, in enumerating the conditions that have made it possible for him to manufacture his phenomenon he systematically discounts the huge mental toils, the plodding, methodical research, of himself and others.Thus, by a singular contradiction, he succeeds in convincing himself and, of course, attempts to persuade others, that he has arrived at the origin of his phenomenon; he sets out to demonstrate that everything in the universe runs perfectly smoothly by itself, without any creative power at anytime intruding.
Gabriel Marcel
Humor: the divine flash that reveals the world in its moral ambiguity and man in his profound incompetence to judge others; humor: the intoxicating relativity of human things; the strange pleasure that conies of the certainty that there is no certainty.But humor, to recall Octavio Paz, is "the great invention of the modern spirit." It has not been with us forever, and it won't be with us forever either.With a heavy heart, I imagine the day when Panurge no longer makes people laugh.
Milan Kundera
Men lose more conquests by their own awkwardness than by any virtue in the woman.
Ninon de l'Enclos
Night is mine, together with a substantial part of the future.
Nelly Kaplan
À l'aurore, armés d'une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes.
Arthur Rimbaud
Of course I love you. It is my fault that you have not known it all the while" (the flower to little prince)
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Men of learning in Milan have not enjoyed proper respect. They hid themselves in their laboratories and thought themselves lucky if . . . priests left them alone. All is changed today. Thought in Italy is free. Inquisition, intolerance, despots have vanished. I invite scholars to meet and propose what must be done to give science and the arts a new flowering.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence.
Léon Bloy
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
Henri Bergson
A woman with good shoes i never ugly!
Coco Chanel
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
Guy Debord
Thoughts and feelings change sometimes, as one crosses the frontiers.
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Thoreau: ‘The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.’ That is why walking leads to a total loss of interest in what is called – laughably no doubt – the ‘news’, one of whose main features is that it becomes old as soon as it is uttered. Once caught in the rhythm, Thoreau says, you are on the treadmill: you want to know what comes next. The real challenge, though, is not to know what has changed, but to get closer to what remains eternally new. So you should replace reading the morning papers with a walk. News items replace one another, become mixed up together, are repeated and forgotten. But the truth is that as soon as you start walking, all that noise, all those rumours, fade out. What’s new? Nothing: the calm eternity of things, endlessly renewed.
Frédéric Gros
A great nose may be an indexOf a great soul
Edmond Rostand
It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
Albert Camus
Vengeance is pointless, but certain men do not have a place in the world we sought to construct
Simone de Beauvoir
On peut chercher dans Dieu le complice et l'ami qui manquent toujours. Dieu est l'éternel confident dans cette tragédie dont chacun est le héros.
Charles Baudelaire
How did I picture the life after the grave? I fairly bawled out at him: "A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.
Albert Camus
I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.
Emil M. Cioran
Can we reconcile indefinitely these two imperatives: the desire to preserve every individual's special identity and the need for Europeans to be able to communicate with one another all the time and as freely as possible? We cannot leave it to time to solve the dilemma and prevent people from engaging, a few years hence, in bitter and fruitless linguistic conflicts. We know all too well what time will do.The only possible answer is a voluntary policy aimed at strengthening linguistic diversity and based on a simple idea: nowadays everybody obviously needs three languages. The first is his language of identity; the third is English. Between the two we have to promote a third language, freely chosen, which will often but not always be another European language. This will be for everyone the main foreign language taught at school, but it will also be much more than that--the language of the heart, the adopted language, the language you have married, the language you love.
Amin Maalouf
There isn't a man on earth who doesn't at times pronounce an opinion on good and evil, even if it be only to find fault with somebody else.
Simone Weil
: woman is an eminently poetic reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to be.
Simone de Beauvoir
A wise man sees as much as he ought not as much as he can.
Michel de Montaigne
What a grand thing to be loved! What a grander thing still to lovel
Victor Hugo
MY GOD!' read Monte Cristo, 'LET ME KEEP MY MEMORY!
Alexandre Dumas
If you press me to say why I loved him I can say no more than because he was he and I was I.
Michel de Montaigne
What is the use of the colon? What is a colon? Generally it opens onto an explanation, but it is always done with the help of an interruption. It can be said that the colon is not the period, it is the period of the period, the canceling of the period. It is a moment mute and marked; it is the most delicate tattoo of the text. It is also in place of, instead of, everything that would be causal. For example, when we read: "It's simply that: secret." "Secret," is a sentence, it is the shortest sentence perhaps. But it is a sentence in one word. It is a sentence that is secret and that at the same time says its name. One could invert and say: "Secret: it is simply that." This is secret, the secret is the secret of this, it is a word which makes infinite sense all by itself, it is a sentence which performs the secret itself [Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, trans Elizabeth Lowe & Earl Fitz, Foreword by Hélène Cixous trans Verena Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989]
Hélène Cixous
Action makes more fortunes than caution.
Vauvenargues
Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.
Guillaume Apollinaire
Democratic and aristocratic states are not in their own nature free. Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments; and even in these it is not always found. It is there only when there is no abuse of power. But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.
Montesquieu
She was dark-haired, fierce; she wore two drop earrings made of crystal; her face was a pure oval tickled with dimples; her skin was golden; and her laugh was like a fire in the night. But on her face you could also read the concentration of a soul whose life is entirely inward, and a mischievous gravity which acquires a silver patina with age.
Muriel Barbery
If they want peace nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon-shots.
Napoleon
(it was) beautiful, like so many senseless things.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipw
Guy de Maupassant
The history books which contain no lies are extremely tedious
Anatole France
Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Marthe Troly-Curtin