Quotes by French Authors - Page 13

Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.
Albert Camus
The heart, said to be man’s noblest organ, has the same shape as the penis, commonly supposed the most ignoble; the symbolism is not inappropriate, because the love which comes from the heart soon extends to the organ which it resembles.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
look you, there are only two classes of men, the magnanimous, and the rest; and I have reached an age when one has to take sides, to decide once and for all whom one is going to like and dislike, to stick to the people one likes, and, to make up for the time one has wasted with the others, never to leave them again as long as one lives.
Marcel Proust
The true division of humanity is this: the luminous and the dark.To diminish the number of the dark, to increase the number of the luminous, there is the aim.That is why we cry: education, knowledge! to learn to read is to kindle a fire; every syllable spelled sparkles.But whoever say light does not necessarily say joy.There is suffering in light; an excess burns. Flames is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, this is the miracle of genius
Victor Hugo
Vincent had ten major ideas every week: three brilliant, five good, and two ridiculous.
Jean-Dominique Bauby
The confidence which we have in ourselves gives birth to much of that which we have in others.
François de La Rochefoucauld
We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.
Michel de Montaigne
The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful...
Henri Bergson
Carmen will always be free.
Prosper Mérimée
I am what the water gave me, / a smoke-ring in a jar, / the braided rope / my ladder-to-the-light, / my shivering bird heart / caught
Pascale Petit
We don't have enough time to premeditate all our actions.
Vauvenargues
The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and Crick of the structural basis of its replicative invariance, are without any doubt the most important discoveries ever made in biology. To this must be added the theory of natural selection, whose certainty and full significance were established only by those later theories.
Jacques Monod
God same me from my friends I can protect myself from my enemies.
Marshal de Villars
When my friends lack an eye I look at them in profile.
Joseph Joubert
It is not the services we render them but the services they render us that attaches people to us.
Labiche et Martin
Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity
George Steiner
Ah, Monsieur Priest, you love not the crudities of the true. Christ loved them. He seized a rod and cleared out the Temple. His scourge, full of lightnings, was a harsh speaker of truths. When he cried, 'Sinite parvulos,' he made no distinction between the little children. It would not have embarrassed him to bring together the Dauphin of Barabbas and the Dauphin of Herod. Innocence, Monsieur, is its own crown. Innocence has no need to be a highness. It is as august in rags as in fleurs de lys.
Victor Hugo
Who understands much forgives much.
Madame de Stael
By nature independent, gay, even exuberant, seductively responsive and given to those spontaneous sallies that sparkle in the conversation of certain daughters of Paris who seem to have inhaled since childhood the pungent breath of the boulevards laden with the nightly laughter of audiences leaving theaters, Madame de Burne's five years of bondage had nonetheless endowed her with a singular timidity which mingled oddly with her youthful mettle, a great fear of saying too much, of going to far, along with a fierce yearning for emancipation and a firm resolve never again to compromise her freedom.
Guy de Maupassant
A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men.
Georges F. Doriot
for the first time in his life, sex is located away from all danger, away from conflict and drama, away from persecution, away from any accusation, away from worries; he has nothing to take care of, love is taking care of him, love as he's always wanted it and never had it: love-repose; love-oblivion; love-desertion; love-carefreeness; love-meaningless.
Milan Kundera
My star will just be one of the stars, for you. And so you will love to watch all the stars in the heavens...they will all be your friends."-the little prince
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I have heard Silvius, an excellent physician of Paris, say that lest the digestive faculties of the stomach should grow idle, it were not amiss once a month to rouse them by this excess, and to spur them lest they should grow dull and rusty; and one author tells us that the Persians used to consult about their mostimportant affairs after being well warmed with wine.
Michel de Montaigne
Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.
Roland Barthes
A writer never takes a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing
Eugène Ionesco
How wonderful to find in living creatures the same substance as those which make up minerals. Nevertheless they felt a sort of humiliation at the idea that their persons contained phosphorous like matches, albumen like white of egg, hydrogen gas like street lamps.
Gustave Flaubert
It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Reading brings us unknown friends
Honoré de Balzac
Prosperity makes some friends and many enemies.
Vauvenargues
To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
... novels contained something inexpressibly delicious.
Marcel Proust
The truth is that you are afraid.''Afraid? I do not know all the words in the Parisian jargon, and I know not what you mean.
Alexandre Dumas
Women particularly should concern themselves with peace because men by nature are more foolhardy and headstrong, and their overwhelming desire to avenge themselves prevents them from foreseeing the resulting dangers and terrors of war. But woman by nature is more gentle and circumspect. Therefore, if she has sufficient will and wisdom she can provide the best possible means to pacify man.
Christine de Pizan
It is in the perfect union of two hearts that complete and total marriage consists.
Bernard of Clairvaux
In general I strive for greatness and rational achievement, but I admit to you I’ve a terrible fondness for women, a tendency towards drunkenness, and a weakness for the fumes of the poppy—opium and other miserable beauties.
Roman Payne
For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
Gustave Flaubert
Childhood memories surge back more vividly midway through life – like some palimpsest whose original text suddenly reappears after the manuscript has been chemically treated.
Gérard de Nerval
On coming out of the chapel, a well can be seen on the left. There are two in this yard. You ask, Why is there no bucket and no pulley to this one? Because no water is drawn from it now. Why is no more water drawn from it? Because it is full of skeletons.
Victor Hugo
Écoutez le monde blanchorriblement las de son effort immenseses articulations rebelles craquer sous les étoiles duresses raideurs d'acier bleu transperçant la chair mystiqueécoute ses victoires proditoires trompeter ses défaitesécoute aux alibis grandioses son piètre trébuchementPitié pour nos vainquers omniscients et naïfs !
Aimé Césaire
Trade protection accumulates upon a single point the good which it effects, while the evil inflicted is infused throughout the mass. The one strikes the eye at a first glance, while the other becomes perceptible only to close investigation.
Frédéric Bastiat
One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.
Simone de Beauvoir
Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.
Voltaire
I have no ambition to change my nature, I merely intend to conquer my dislikes.
Georges Bernanos
The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.
Jean Baudrillard
At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.
Albert Schweitzer
Nothing is a sin when you obey the orders of a priest
Alfred de Musset
The method of addition is quite charming if it involves adding to the self such things as a cat, a dog, roast pork, love of the sea or of cold showers. But the matter becomes less idyllic if a person decides to add love for communism, for the homeland, for Mussolini, for Roman Catholicism or atheism, for fascism or anti-fascism. In both cases the method remains exactly the same: a person stubbornly defending the superiority of cats over other animals is doing basically the same thing as one who maintains that Mussolini was the sole saviour of Italy: he is proud of this attribute of the self and he tries to make this attribute (a cat or Mussolini) acknowledged and loved by everyone.Here is that strange paradox to which all people cultivating the self by way of the addition method are subject: they use addition in order to create a unique, inimitable self, yet because they automatically become propagandists for the added attributes, they are actually doing everything in their power to make as many others as possible similar to themselves; as a result, their uniqueness (so painfully gained) quickly begins to disappear.
Milan Kundera
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.
Victor Hugo
I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled all the same because it’s never anything more.
Simone de Beauvoir
He was dying all his life.
Hector Berlioz
Le bonheur est cette danse où l'on s'approche et l'on s'écarte sans se perdre. Il est même fait des larmes des longues séparations à condition que viennent les retrouvailles.
Timothée de Fombelle
The vigor I lacked for physical activities became incandescent when, pen in hand, I filled those pages with invented stories. Sometimes they were intimately about me – family tales, parental exploits – sometimes they became horrific stories sprinkled with torture, death, and reunion: crazy games and tear-soaked sagas.
Philippe Grimbert
Imagination disposes of everything it creates beauty justice and happiness which is everything in this world.
Pascal
Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement.
Albert Camus
Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people.
Victor Hugo
One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ‘the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.
Gustave Flaubert
For the maintenance of peace nations should avoid the pin-pricks which forerun cannon-shots.
Napoleon
I cursed myself. For once, heaven had sent me "Beauty" in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry down... How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death?
Roman Payne