Quotes by French Authors - Page 133

As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.
Albert Camus
I’m brutally honest.”              “No kidding. Sometimes a little too honest. There’s this word called tact, it’s in the dictionary under the letter T.”“I don’t believe you, I think you just made that word up.
St. Clair
At a great distance appeared with the same pomp the sheep of Thebes, the dog of Bubastis, the cat of Phoebe, the crocodile of Arsinoe, the goat of Mendes, and all the inferior gods of Egypt, who came to pay homage to the great ox, to the mighty Apis, as powerful as Isis, Osiris, and Horus, united together.In the midst of the demi-gods, forty priests carried an enormous basket, filled with sacred onions. These were, it is true, gods, but they resembled onions very much.("The White Bull")
Voltaire
I couldn't quite understand how an ordinary man's good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man.
Albert Camus
The Lord commands us to do good unto all men without exception, though the majority are very undeserving when judged according to their own merits... [The Scripture] teaches us that we must not think of man's real value, but only of his creation in the image of God to which we owe all possible honor and love.
John Calvin
A quarrel between friends when made up adds a new tie to friendship as ... the callosity formed 'round a broken bone makes it stronger than before.
Saint Francis de Sales
I showed him the sea. It's a great luxury, being able to see it from the balcony. When cities are bombed there are always ruins and corpses left. But you can drop an atomic bomb in the sea and ten minutes later it's back as it was before. You can't change the shape of water.
Marguerite Duras
You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. you see a women, you think that one day she'll be old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.
Jean-Paul Sartre
In the boundaryless forests, there’re dancers of nude.Yet in the confines of pasture, there’s promise of food.On which is your side?Ô, but tarry and bide,ere you decide,in both do confide.
Roman Payne
The past has given us much too many bad answers for us not to see that the mistakes were in the questions themselves. There is no need to choose between the fetishism of spontaneity and the organization control; between the "come one, come all" of activist networks and the discipline of hierarchy; between acting desperately now and waiting desperately for later; between bracketing that which is to be lived and experimented in the name of paradise that seems more and more like a hell the longer it is put off and flogging the dead horse of how planting carrots is enough to leave this nightmare.
The Invisible Committee
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
Jean-Paul Sartre
As she uttered the words of the prayer, she glanced up at him as if he were God Himself. He watched her with growing pleasure. In front of him was kneeling the directress, being humiliated by a subordinate; in front of him a naked revolutionary was being humiliated by prayer; in front of him a praying lady was being humiliated by her nakedness.This threefold image of degradation intoxicated him and something unexpected suddenly happened: his body revoked its passive resistance. Edward was excited!As the directress said, 'And lead us not into temptation,' he quickly threw off all his clothes. When she said, 'Amen,' he violently lifted her off the floor and dragged her onto the couch.
Milan Kundera
True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.
François de La Rochefoucauld
You speak of the hand of Fatma, my friends, but you do not know the terrible power of this hand, the hand of monsters that menace you and seduce you with their subterranean access, their metallic splintering, their inhuman grotesqueness of idols.
Georges Limbour
She [Nana] listened to his [Steiner's] propositions, turning them down every time with a shake of the head and that provocative laughter which is peculiar to full-bodied blondes.
Émile Zola
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to live to yourself.
Michel de Montaigne
And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her?
Marcel Proust
No, monsieur,” returned Monte Cristo “upon the simple condition that they should respect myself and my friends. Perhaps what I am about to say may seem strange to you, who are socialists, and vaunt humanity and your duty to your neighbor, but I never seek to protect a society which does not protect me, and which I will even say, generally occupies itself about me only to injure me; and thus by giving them a low place in my esteem, and preserving a neutrality towards them, it is society and my neighbor who are indebted to me.
Alexandre Dumas
When he [Malevranche] happened to find Descartes' book entitled Man in a book shop on the rue Saint Jaques, he leafed through it, bought it and "read it with so much pleasure that he was forced at times to interrupt his reading, so loud were the beatings of his heart due to the extreme pleasure he had in doing so". Those who never put down a book of erudition, science or philosophy, to catch their breath, so to speak, and recover from the strong emotion they experience, certainly ignore of of the most exquisite pleasures of intellectual life.
Étienne Gilson
Hope is a light diet but very stimulating.
Honoré de Balzac
The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.
André Gide
I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them.
Anaïs Nin
The meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded.
Milan Kundera
Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Guy Billout
There was something about total loyalty, uncritical devotion, endless patience, perpetual forgiveness and the general inability to believe that a loved one could ever do anything wrong that, frankly, just gave him the creeps.
Joanne Harris
Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. It is not enough that a thing be possible for it to be believed.
Voltaire
For a young man has strong imagination but poor judgment, so that he imagines others to be as big as he is but considers himself to be very small. He has unbounded trust in the universe but is constantly unsure of himself.
Marcel Proust
A jeweler will prefer the smallest fragment of diamond to several sapphires; and so, in the order established by God, our intimacy with Him gives Him more glory than all possible good, procured by us, for a great number of souls, but to the detriment of our own progress. Our Heavenly Father, “who devotes Himself more to the direction of a soul in which He reigns, than to the natural government of the whole universe and to the civil government of all empires,” looks for this harmony in our zeal.
Jean-Baptiste Chautard
The dragon spits fire, what extinguishes its tears. When we live in rancor, we are born to be old. (Le dragon crache du feu, - Ce qui éteint ses larmes. - Quand on vit de rancune, - On naît pour être vieux.)
Charles de Leusse
Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their authors. We know everything about the former, or at least as much as we are meant to know, everything that is written about a given character in a novel, a story or a poem in which she or he figures...The rest doesn't matter. Nothing is hidden from us. For us, a novel's characters are real. (p. 80
Jacques Bonnet
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
Albert Camus
Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
Marcel Proust
The King! I thought him enough of a philosopher to realize that there is no such thing as murder in politics. You know as well as I do, my dear boy, that in politics there are no people, only ideas; no feelings, only interests. In politics, you don't kill a man, you remove an obstacle, that's all.
Alexandre Dumas
In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A kiss can be a comma a question mark or an exclamation point. That's a basic spelling that every woman should know.
Mistinguette
I want to paint the way a bird sings.
Claude Monet
Kings may usurp thrones, republics may be established, but the town scarcely stirs. Plassan sleeps while Paris fights.
Émile Zola
Those who are ignorant should be taught all you can teach them; society is to blame for not providing free public education; and society will answer for the obscurity it produces. If the soul is left in darkness, sin will be committed. The guilty party is not he who has sinned but he who created the darkness in the first place.
Victor Hugo
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules
Albert Camus
Man is free rather than man is freedom.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A woman is like your shadow follow her she flies fly from her she follows.
Sebastien Chamfort
With older people, it's quite different. They're reliable, they show you what to do, and there's solidity in their affection.
Jean-Paul Sartre
It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes...
Emil M. Cioran
Oh,' said a very white body as it threw a wrist watch to the ground which broke without attracting anyone's attention, 'Oh, how can anyone not love poetry, natural machines, large white houses, the brilliance of steel, crimes and wild passions?
Robert Desnos
A man who should undertake to inquire into everything for himself, could devote to each thing but little time and attention. His task would keep his mind in perpetual unrest, which would prevent him from penetrating to the depth of any truth, or of grappling his mind indissolubly to any conviction. His intellect would be at once independent and powerless. He must therefore make his choice from amongst the various objects of human belief, and he must adopt many opinions without discussion, in order to search the better into that smaller number which he sets apart for investigation. It is true that whoever receives an opinion on the word of another, does so far enslave his mind; but it is a salutary servitude which allows him to make a good use of freedom.A principle of authority must then always occur, under all circumstances, in some part or other of the moral and intellectual world. Its place is variable, but a place it necessarily has. The independence of individual minds may be greater, or it may be less: unbounded it cannot be. Thus the question is, not to know whether any intellectual authority exists in the ages of democracy, but simply where it resides and by what standard it is to be measured.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
Eugène Ionesco
When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.
Jean Cocteau
A picture might be worth a thousand words but a good sentence is worth a thousand windows
Mati Klarwein
everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure
Alexis de Tocqueville
Release is not the same as liberation. You get out of jail, all right, but you never stop being condemned.
Victor Hugo
The greatest wisdom consists in knowing one's own follies.
Madame de Sablé
The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other person—which means, moreover, to have non-read the same books. From the beginning of the relationship, then, it is crucial to show that we can match the expectations of our beloved by making him or her sense the proximity of our inner libraries.
Pierre Bayard
Such days of autumnal decline hold a strange mystery which adds to the gravity of all our moods.
Charles Nodier
To describe happiness is to diminish it.
Stendhal
Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms
Guy de Maupassant
You are to be pitied more than I, perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of the angels; for, as you have said, my place is not in your narrow sphere. You have the earth, I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid Ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep.
Herculine Barbin
Even Jesus, three days, died. Who is strong doesn't make the strong. (Même Jésus, trois jours, est mort. Qui est fort ne fait le fort)
Charles de Leusse
Joy is not the satisfied contemplation of an accomplished result, the emotion of victory, the satisfaction of having succeeded. It is the sign of an energy that is deftly deployed, it is a free affirmation: everything comes easy. Joy is an activity: executing with ease something difficult that has taken time to master, asserting the faculties of the mind and the body. Joys of thought when it finds and discovers, joys of the body when it achieves without effort. That is why joy, unlike pleasure, increases with repetition, and is enriched. When you are walking, joy is a basso continuo. Locally, of course, you may run into effort and difficulty. You will also find immediate moments of contentment: a proud gaze backwards to contemplate the long steep plunge of the slope behind you. Those satisfactions, though, too often present an opportunity to reintroduce quantities, scores, figures (which track? how long? what altitude?). And walking becomes a competition. That is why expeditions in high mountain country (conquering peaks, each one a challenge) are always slightly impure: because they give rise to narcissistic gratification. What dominates in walking, away from ostentation and showing off, is the simple joy of feeling your body in the most primitively natural activity.
Frédéric Gros