Quotes by French Authors - Page 131

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.
Charles Baudelaire
Unhappiness indicates wrong thinking just as ill health indicates a bad regimen.
Paul Bourget
Imagine all contradictions, all possible incompatibilities--you will find them in the government, in the law-courts, in the churches, in the public shows of this droll nation.
Voltaire
If you start to take Vienna - take Vienna.
Napoléon Bonaparte
If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
Albert Camus
Thought is the strongest thing we have. Work done by true and profound thought - that is a real force.
Albert Schweitzer
Let these men sing out their songs,they've been walking all day long,all their fortune's spent and gone...silver dollar in the subway station;quarters for the papers for the jobs.
Roman Payne
Now, these eager and apprehensive men of small property constitute the class which is constantly increased by the equality of conditions. Hence, in democratic communities, the majority of the people do not clearly see what they have to gain by a revolution, but they continually and in a thousand ways feel that they might lose by one.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Ni dieu ni maître!(Neither God nor master)[Feminist and labour slogan translated to 'No gods, no masters']
Louis-Auguste Blanqui
Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.
Emil M. Cioran
He trusted that I would have a very pleasant stay: it was so peaceful, and the meals were delicious. As he said it, I realized that he was expressing not just a belief, but a hope, because he was one of those people, and you don't see them every day, who take an instinctive pleasure in the happiness of their fellow men – that he was, in other words, a nice guy.
Michel Houellebecq
Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.
Marcel Proust
Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.
Paul Gauguin
Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.
Jules Renard
She wakes in a puddle of sunlight.Her hands asleep beside her.Her hair draped on the lawnlike a mantle of cloth.I give her my trothfor our love is whole;her breath is my wine,her scent is my soul.
Roman Payne
When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.
Hélène Cixous
If man--if each one of us--abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each one of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinates will be transformed into inevitabilities.
Jacques Ellul
Facts, and facts alone, are the foundation of science... When one devotes oneself to experimental research it is in order to augment the sum of known facts, or to discover their mutual relations.
François Magendie
The more things change the more they stay the same. (Plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose.)
Alphonse Karr
I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed,we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl. Her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels. For a long time, we were parked a few yards beyond without getting out, fully absorbed in the sight of the corpse. The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our usual impression upon seeing one another.
Georges Bataille
Great ability without discretion comes almost invariably to a tragic end.
Leon Gambetta
Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.
Voltaire
Every man is capable of doing good to another, but to contribute to the happiness of an entire society is to become akin to the gods
Montesquieu
The thinking (person) must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another.
Albert Schweitzer
Limited in his nature infinite in his desires man is a fallen god who remembers heaven.
Alphonse de Lamartine
You are never fully dressed until you put on a smile!
Les Miserables
Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity
Guy Debord
If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.
Antonin Artaud
There was a shepherd the other day up at Findon Fair who had come from the east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different from the eyes of other men.
Hilaire Belloc
In this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject.
Roland Barthes
How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love. For men, how bittersweet this is.
Albert Camus
To be "modern" means refusing to worry about where the benefits of progress actually come from.
Sylvain Tesson
In action be primitive in foresight a strategist.
René Char
Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning?
Hélène Cixous
Better a living beggar than a buried emperor.
Jean de La Fontaine
A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with cleanunderwear—instead of being allowed to pursue something higher —stores up greatreserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over theirbooks. (...) The difference between the universitygraduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in theextent of vitality and self-confidence. The elan with which Tereza flung herself into hernew Prague existence was both frenzied and precarious. She seemed to be expectingsomeone to come up to her any day and say, What are you doing here? Go back whereyou belong!
Milan Kundera
the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.
Emil M. Cioran
Nothing becomes some women more than the prick of ambition. Love, on the contrary, may make them very dull.
Françoise Sagan
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal
The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.
Elliott Erwitt
I look at what I have not and think myself unhappy others look at what I have and think me happy.
Joseph Roux
Being afraid is the worst sin there is.
Jean-Paul Belmondo
Deep within everyone's heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. For several weeks or months, rarely longer, a beautiful young woman lives outside ordinary life. She is intoxicated. She feels as if she exists beyond time, beyond its laws; she experiences not the monotonous succession of days passing by, but moments of intense, almost desperate happiness.
Irène Némirovsky
In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: “What did they think of us?”—“Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?”—“Did they like us?”—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading.
Marcel Proust
I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.
Jean-Paul Sartre
she gives birth in pain, she heals males' wounds, she nurses the newborn and buries the dead; of man she knows all that offends his pride and humiliates his will. While inclining before him and submitting flesh to spirit, she remains on the carnal borders of the spirit; and she contests the sharpness of hard masculine architecture by softening the angles; she introduces free luxury and unforeseen grace.
Simone de Beauvoir
Do everything with the greatest possible calm and serenity and out of the greatest, purest and holiest love of Jesus and Mary.
Father Jacques Philippe
As a general rule...people ask for advice only in order not to follow it; or if they do follow it, in order to have someone to blame for giving it.
Alexandre Dumas
Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.
Blaise Pascal
At five in the morning, some policemen, unannounced, entered the house of a man named Pardon, later a member of the section of the Barricade-Merry, and still later killed in the insurrection of April 1834, found him standing not far from his bed, with cartridges in his hands, caught in the act.
Victor Hugo
Age does not protect you from love. But love to some extent protects you from age.
Jeanne Moreau
Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).
Simone Weil
The power of habit and the charm of novelty are the two adverse forces which explain the follies of mankind.
Maria De Beausacq
And so too, in later years, when I began to write a book of my own, and the quality of some sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to go on with the undertaking. I would find the equivalent in Bergotte. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages, that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I had perceived in my mind's eye, and in my fear of their not turning out "true to life," how could I find time to ask myself whether what I was writing was pleasing!
Marcel Proust
Time to read is always time stolen. (Like time to write, for that matter, or time to love).Stolen from what?From the tyranny of living.
Daniel Pennac
Every situation is of man's making and can only contain what man contains.
Milan Kundera
I did not wait to hear the end of my father's story, for I had been with him myself after mass when we had met M. Legrandin; instead, I went downstairs to the kitchen to ask about the menu for our dinner, which was of fresh interest to me daily, like the news in a paper, and excited me as might the programme of a coming festivity.
Marcel Proust
Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.
Milan Kundera
I imagine that the essential gesture of the Operator is to surprise something or someone (through the little hole in the camera), and that this gesture is therefore perfect when it is performed unbeknownst to the subject being photographed. From this gesture derive all photographs whose principle (or better whose alibi) is “shock”; for the photographic “shock” consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it.
Roland Barthes
Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.
Gustave Flaubert