Quotes by French Authors - Page 122

Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still.
Roman Payne
And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity...
Anaïs Nin
Look: each moment is a cradle and a casket: may all life and all death seem strange and new to you.
Marcel Schwob
Frail to the point of invalidism, without family and with nothing to look forward to, she [Mlle Muguette] yet contrived to be happy. How strange a thing is happiness! Mlle Pimpalet, the notary's wife, arrogantly middle-class, well-furnished with the goods of this world, cared for and waited on, yet invariably looked as if she had been given rat poison for breakfast. While Muguette with nothing, almost on the parish, was radiant with carefree joyousness. Her courage almost made people want to kiss her.
Gabriel Chevallier
Proverty and wealth are comparative sins.
Victor Hugo
What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
Milan Kundera
But stories are worlds. New worlds for us to visit. In stories, we live forever.
Joanne Harris
Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.
Marcel Proust
The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.
Voltaire
All the stars are a riot of flowers.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Myth Number 4: Social Media Is the Shiny New Thing. Two Years from Now, That Bubble Will Burst Yes, it is the shiny new thing. No, two years from now, that bubble will not burst. There is no bubble. What social media represents is an evolution in the field of communications, just as the Internet and mobility before it. The tools will change, the platforms will evolve, but the way in which people communicate with other people through digital networks and electronic devices has been fundamentally transformed through the development of social media. We did not grow tired of the telephone, of the...
Olivier J. Blanchard
Help!"This was my last cry. My mouth filled with water, I struggled against being drawn the abyss. Suddenly my clothes were seized by a strong hand, and I felt myself quickly drawn up to the surface of the sea; and I heard, yes, I heard these words pronounced in my ear:"If master would be so good as to lean on my shoulder, master would swim with much greater ease."I seized with one hand my faithful Conseil's arm. "Is it you?" said I, "you?""Myself," answered Conseil; "and waiting master's orders.""That shock threw you as well as me in the sea?""No; but, being in my master's service, I followed him."The worthy fellow thought that was but natural.
Jules Verne
When I religiously confess myself to myself I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.
Michel de Montaigne
The general kind and soft customs of Mustang were soon to strike me as exceptional. Apart from occasional disputes between husband and wife, which like family rows all around the world bring raised voices, I never heard a person scream or shout; Even the children had very civilised manners. In fact the only person I knew to consistently angry in Lo Mantang was myself, and Tibetans consider bd temper a Western characteristic. Take for example the reactions of European to missing his train; he will invariably swear under his breath. Who in our can stand frustration without giving vent to anger? I soon had to master my own temper, having raised my voice against one of the innumerable people who stopped to stare at me and my smal party, I was told by a peasant: ‘’I cannot understand; you are a great man, how is it that small things like myself deserve your wrath?’’ After that I learned to be tolerant, realising that by getting mad I was only debasing myself, and that it was stupid to be bothered by trivialities.
Michel Peissel
And ask each passenger to tell his story, and if there is one of them all who has not cursed his existence many times, and said to himself over and over again that he was the most miserable of men, I give you permission to throw me head-first into the sea.
Voltaire
It is when the heavenly fire has departed and the soul is cool again that we discover the real quality of our will.
Jean Nicolas Grou
A woman is human, obviously, but she represents a slightly different kind of humanity.
Michel Houellebecq
You did not fear death. You stepped in its path, but without really desiring it: how can one desire something one doesn’t know? You didn’t deny life but affirmed your taste for the unknown, betting that if something existed on the other side, it would be better than here.
Édouard Levé
Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it’s either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.
Milan Kundera
From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty
Victor Hugo
A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
Stendhal
Haven't you got it through your head that human thought is a thing of the past & that philosophy is worse than Bertillon's guide to harassed cops? You make me laugh with your metaphysical anguish, it's just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral & animal, all disorder, & so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought, history, wars, inventions, business & the arts, & all theories, passions & systems. It's always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out of it? And what will you make? What are you looking for? There's no truth. There's only action, action subjected to every possible & imaginable contingency & contradiction. Life. Life is a crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust, stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. What can you do about it, my poor friend?
Blaise Cendrars
That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour but that which we have forgotten having said or even what we never said will cause laughter even into the next world.
Marcel Proust
His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.
Victor Hugo
That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope.
Emil M. Cioran
He let Julius go. There was beginning to rise in him a feeling of profound disgust--a kind of hatred almost, of himself, of Julius, of everything.
André Gide
I have an ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition. Why you will not have ambition? Why? Have the greatest ambition possible. You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it. You want to make the most fantastic art or movie? Try. If you fail, is not important. We need to try.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.
Roland Barthes
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
Roland Barthes
I'm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country, that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black, has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man.
Gustave Flaubert
A woman of honor should not suspect another of things she would not do herself.
Marguerite de Valois
He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.
Jean-Luc Godard
You lift your head, you’re on your way, but really just to be walking, to be out of doors. That’s it, that’s all, and you’re there. Outdoors is our element: the exact sensation of living there.
Frédéric Gros
Love is the enchanted dawn of every heart.
Alphonse de Lamartine
In all times, and all countries especially in those countries which are divided within by religious faith, there are always fanatics who will be well contented to be regarded as martyrs.
Alexandre Dumas
[It's] long been known that making fun of oneself is only a way of taking oneself seriously slightly less crude than others. 97
Marcel Benabou
In order to understand the intensity of ritual forms, one must rid oneself of the idea that all happiness derives from nature, and all pleasure from the satisfaction of a desire. On the contrary, games, the sphere of play, reveal a passion for rules, a giddiness born of rules, and a force that comes from ceremony, and not desire.
Jean Baudrillard
When you are forty half of you belongs to the past. . . And when you are seventy nearly all of you.
Jean Anouilh
The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.
Victor Hugo
Of necessity she went further in aversion than she had gone in love, for her hatred was not in proportion to her love but to her disappointed hopes.
Honoré de Balzac
Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal’s or Faulkner’s.
Milan Kundera
A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.
Marcel Proust
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
Marcel Proust
All human wisdom is contained in these two words: 'wait' and 'hope'".
Alexandre Dumas
As I begin to recognise that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognise that I am a Negro. There are two ways out of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no attention to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it. I try then to find value for what is bad--since I have unthinkingly conceded that the black man is the colour of evil. In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman in short, I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and through one human being, to reach out for the universal. When the Negro dives--in other words, goes under--something remarkable occurs.
Frantz Fanon
We ought to act with God in the greatest simplicity speak to Him frankly and plainly and implore His assistance in our affairs.
Brother Lawrence
Reader's Bill of Rights1. The right to not read 2. The right to skip pages 3. The right to not finish 4. The right to reread 5. The right to read anything 6. The right to escapism 7. The right to read anywhere 8. The right to browse 9. The right to read out loud 10. The right to not defend your tastes
Daniel Pennac
The color of truth is grey.
André Gide
Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
Napoléon Bonaparte
My prayer to God is a very short one "Oh Lord make my enemies ridiculous!" God has granted it.
Voltaire
Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
Milan Kundera
Think, speak, and act. With age comes self-reproach: I might have done more. Therefore now do!
Théophile Thoré
God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world
Gustave Flaubert
Nature loves death: she will not punish it.
Guy de Maupassant
Booty Butt, Booty Butt, Booty Butt Cheeks
René Descartes
Isn't it better to have men be ungrateful than to miss a chance to do good?
Denis Diderot
That's the way it is--you have a thought, a dream, an idea in your head . . . and you do nothing to make it happen. Then one day, boom, just like that, you get up and go.
Susie Morgenstern
At first glance it seems strange that the attitude of the anti-Semite can be equated with that of the negrophobe. It was my philosophy teacher from the Antilles who reminded me one day: “When you hear someone insulting the Jews pay attention; he is talking about you.” And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and my soul for the fate reserved for my brother. Since then, I have understood that what he meant quite simply was the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe.
Frantz Fanon
The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that ‘black hole’ is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions—nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze.With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.
Flaubert Gustave
If we are to judge of love by its consequences it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship.
La Rochefoucauld