Quotes by French Authors - Page 138

Quand le doigt montre le ciel, l’imbécile regarde le doigt. [When a finger is pointing up to the sky, only a fool looks at the finger.]
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Most men who run down women are running down one woman only.
Rémy de Gourmont
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
Roland Barthes
There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.
Coco Chanel
They were really willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media.... Even if all the university professors in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn't found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.
Michel Houellebecq
I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.
Guy de Maupassant
What we call happiness is what we do not know.
Anatole France
The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought.
Marcel Proust
Look: each moment is a cradle and a casket: may all life and all death seem strange to you.
Marcel Schwob
Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest. To be this ploughman, to see my labours result in the furtherance of scientific progress, was the height of my ambition, and now the Swedish Academy of Sciences has come, at this harvest, to add the most brilliant of crowns.
Paul Sabatier
And the wind falls silent, and the birds fall silent, and the wild cherry trees no longer shiver and creek.
Daniel Arsand
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.
Marcel Proust
There are four varieties in society the lovers the ambitious observers and fools. The fools are the happiest.
Hippolyte Taine
come, ancient and unchanging nightNight, born as dethroned king,Night, internally equal to silence, Night.With sequins of volatile starlightWoven on your robe with infinityCome quietlyCome fleet-footedCome alone.
Pierre Péju
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie.
Gustave Flaubert
We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked.
Honoré de Balzac
One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.
Gustave Flaubert
Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.
Jean Rostand
Enthusiasm signifies God in us.
Madame de Stael
I grant men the land, the government, the wealth, all the chances. I accept that you have to hold all the cards, since that's the only way you know how to play; but I refuse to swallow your disrespect.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness.
Anaïs Nin
In the meantime, there is not an hour to lose. I am about to visit the public library.
Jules Verne
A fondness for roving, for making a name for themselves in their onw country, and for boasting of what they had seen in their travels, was so strong in our two wanderers, that they resolved to be no longer happy; and demanded permission of the king to leave the country.
Voltaire
Every damn fool thing you do in this life you pay for.
Édith Piaf
Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.
Muriel Barbery
Men are alike in their promises. It is only in their deeds that they differ.
Molière
Well, listen a moment, Monsieur Mayor; I have often been severe in my life towards others. It was just. I did right. Now if I were not severe towards myself, all I have justly done would become injustice. Should I spare myself more than others? No. What! if I should be prompt only to punish others and not myself, I should be a wretched indeed! - Javert to M. Madeleine
Victor Hugo
She was not yet dead. But I was already alone.
Marcel Proust
People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back.They know only too well that misfortune follows in their wake.
Victor Hugo
Now he could say for sure that he'd never known a feeling stronger than that of being at one with another person - that rare feeling of not being alone anymore.
Guillaume Musso
All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.
Marcel Duchamp
The punishment of criminals should be of use when a man is hanged he is good for nothing.
Voltaire
Inspiration comes of working every day.
Charles Baudelaire
There is nothing I detest so much as the contortions of these great time-and-lip servers, these affable dispensers of meaningless embraces, these obliging utterers of empty words, who view every one in civilities
Molière
Men employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.
Voltaire
My soul, be satisfied with flowers,With fruit, with weeds even; but gather themIn the one garden you may call your own.
Edmond Rostand
I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because 'romantic' doesn't mean 'sugary.' It's dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can't attain.
Catherine Breillat
The modern absolutism, which we find the most natural thing in the world, would have been quite beyond the dreams of the most absolute of kings.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
The body is poisoned through the mouth, even so is the heart through the ear ... And even if we do mean no harm, the Evil One means a great deal, and he will use those idle words as a sharp weapon against some neighbor's heart.
Francis de Sales
The Ancient Mariner said to Neptune during a great storm 'O God you will save me if you wish but I am going to go on holding my tiller straight.'
Michel de Montaigne
Art for art's sake.
Victor Cousin
Little tree filled his lungs with the white airness of the night, as if he were going to fly. The living voice of his parents. Elisha's eyes. These were reasons enough to set off on another adventure.Reasons to be Toby Lolness again.
Timothée de Fombelle
I have always thought that if women's hair posed so many problems, God would certainly have made us bald.
Marjane Satrapi
Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul...
Marguerite Yourcenar
Experience is the name men give to their follies or their sorrows.
Alfred de Musset
What about you, Michel, what are you going to do here?'The response closest to the truth was probably something like 'Nothing'; but it's always difficult to explain that kind of thing to an active person.
Michel Houellebecq
It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote all their generosity, all their talent, their transferable dreams of sentimental beauty (for, like all artists, they never seek to realise the value of those dreams, or to enclose them in the four-square frame of everyday life), and their gold, which counts for little, to the fashioning of a fine and precious setting for the rubbed and scratched and ill-polished lives of men.
Marcel Proust
I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.
Albert Camus
I observed on most collected stones the imprints of innumerable plant fragments which were so different from those which are growing in the Lyonnais, in the nearby provinces, and even in the rest of France, that I felt like collecting plants in a new world... The number of these leaves, the way they separated easily, and the great variety of plants whose imprints I saw, appeared to me just as many volumes of botany representing in the same quarry the oldest library of the world.
Antoine de Jussieu
There are cancers so insidious in their nature that their very pulsation is invisible. Such cancers leave the ivory whiteness of the skin untouched, and marble not the firm, fair flesh, with their blue tints; the physician who bends over the patient's chest hears not, through he listens, the insatiable teeth of the disease grinding its onward progress through the muscles, as the blood flows freely on; the knife has never been able to destroy, and rarely even, temporarily, to discern the rage of these mortal scourges; their home is in the mind, which they corrupt; they fill the whole heart until it breaks. Such, madame, are the cancers, fatal to queens; are you, too, free from their scourge?
Alexandre Dumas
The sea is only the embodiment of asupernatural and wonderful existence.It is nothing but love and emotionit is the ‘Living Infinite...
Jules Verne
The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat with an indolent expression and an undulating throat like an unsuccessful literary man.
Hilaire Belloc
So, my dear fellow, if I don't believe in God, I believe still less in man.
Honoré de Balzac
The future is made of the same stuff as the present.
Simone Weil
When one has walked a long way to reach the turning in the path that discloses an anticipated view, and that view appears, there is always a vibration of the landscape. It is repeated in the walker’s body. The harmony of the two presences, like two strings in tune, each feeding off the vibration of the other, is like an endless relaunch. Eternal Recurrence is the unfolding in a continuous circle of the repetition of those two affirmations, the circular transformation of the vibration of the presences. The walker’s immobility facing that of the landscape … it is the very intensity of that co-presence that gives birth to an indefinite circularity of exchanges: I have always been here, tomorrow, contemplating this landscape.
Frédéric Gros
What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths?
Victor Hugo
The most absurd and reckless aspirations have sometimes led to extraordinary success.
Vauvenargues
And do you know the story about Haydn’s head? They cut it away from the still-warm cadaver so some insane scientist could take apart the brain and pinpoint the location of musical genius. And the Einstein Story? He’d carefully written his will with instructions to cremate him. They followed his orders, but his disciple, ever loyal and devoted, refused to live without the master’s gaze on him. Before the cremation, he took the eyes of the cadaver and put them in a bottle of alcohol to keep them watching him until the moment he should die himself. That’s why I said that the crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It’s the only absolute death. And I don’t want any other. Jean-Marc, I want an absolute death.
Milan Kundera
We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history, and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration. A face is like a name. It must have happened some time toward the end of my childhood: I kept looking in the mirror for such a long time that I finally believed that what I was seeing was my self. My recollection of this period is very vague, but I know that the discovery of the self must have been intoxicating. Yet there comes a time when you stand in front of a mirror and ask yourself: this is my self? And why? Why did I want to identify with this? What do I care about this face? And at that moment everything starts to crumble. Everything starts to crumble.
Milan Kundera