Quotes by French Authors - Page 140

Childless people are always expected to explain themselves, although it would never occur to anyone to ask a woman why she became a mother (and to insist on getting good reasons)
Élisabeth Badinter
To be a man is to feel that one's own stone contributes to building the edifice of the world.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
No, she laughed." How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say ‘No’ at the same time, it sounds like neighing — yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up.
Hilaire Belloc
The imaginary is what tends to become real.
André Breton
God's only excuse is that he does not exist
Stendhal
It is not alone what we do but also what we do not do for which we are accountable.
Molière
He had never seen her body so abandoned, so unconscious of all but the desire to be taken and satisfied. She bloomed under his caresses, no longer the girl but the woman already being born.
Anaïs Nin
Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!
Jean Cocteau
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
Marcel Proust
All those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know.
Simone de Beauvoir
No. She told me she was going to marry him, to get French nationality . . . She was obsessed with getting a nationality...
Patrick Modiano
The fact is that I did not know how to understand anything! I ought to have judged by deeds and not by words. She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her . . . I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her . . .
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I like living, breathing better than working...my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.
Marcel Duchamp
He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, - ‘Wait and hope.’ – Your friend, Edmond Dantes, Count of Monte Cristo. The eyes of both were fixed on the spot indicated by the sailor, and on the blue-line separating the sky from the Mediterranean Sea, they perceived a large white sail.
Alexandre Dumas
The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake.
Roman Payne
In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.
Alexis de Tocqueville
If you love a flower which happens to be on a star, it is sweet at night to gaze at the sky. All the stars are a riot of flowers.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.
Michel Legrand
If you wait for the perfect moment when all is safe and assured, it may never arrive. Mountains will not be climbed, races won, or lasting happiness achieved.
Maurice Chevalier
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
Albert Camus
I passionately love liberty, legality, respect for rights, but not democracy. That is what I find in the depth of my soul.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Reading thus introduces an "art" which is anything but passive.
Michel de Certeau
A man may indeed be an honest man; but the folly of sacrifice, of virginity, of devotedness, of martyrdom, arises only from faith in the folly of the Cross.
Emile Bougaud
It is a matter of artistic instinct. In his own thoughts and feelings and way of doing things an actor is worth nothing or he is worth something. If he is worth something then he will try to be worth something more as is only normal in anyone who wants to get on. I can think of no other way to explain artistic development.
Maurice Chevalier
Why does a steward steal? He steals because he's not sure he'll always remain with his master and wants to make his future secure.
Alexandre Dumas
Taking time to live is taking time to appreciate simple silence as better than any kind of talk or watching a flower or watching a guy wash the windows on a skyscraper and wondering what he is thinking.
Gersi Douchan
Art is not what you see but what you make others see
Edgar Degas
Even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth, we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Ah, child and youth, if you knew the bliss which resides in the taste of knowledge, and the evil and ugliness that lies in ignorance, how well you are advised to not complain of the pain and labor of learning.
Christine de Pizan
We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one else can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that picture of what we were at an earlier stage may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups—assuming one is a painter—extracted something that transcends them.
Marcel Proust
Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?
Émile Zola
The same Everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you tomorrow and every day of your life. Either He will shield you from suffering, or He will give you unfailing strength to bear it. Be at peace then, and put aside all anxious thoughts.
Francis de Sales
However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colors his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of eloquence, in thought if not in language, and seem to move in some luminous sphere. Goriot's voice and gesture had at this moment the power of communication that characterizes the great actor. Are not our finer feelings the poems of the human will?
Honoré de Balzac
Nothing is more difficult than competing with myth
Françoise Giroud
On Good Friday last year the SS found some pretext to punish 60 priests with an hour on "the tree." That is the mildest camp punishment. They tie a man's hands together behind his back, palms facing out and fingers pointing backward. Then they turn his hands inwards, tie a chain around his wrists and hoist him up by it. His own wight twists his joints and pulls them apart...Several of the priest who were hung up last year never recovered and died. If you don't have a strong heart, you don't survive it. Many have a permanently crippled hand.
Jean Bernard
People who know me know I'm strong, but I'm vulnerable.
Catherine Deneuve
I don't know where I'm going to be in three years. Because I have the feeling that the future is so full of possibilities, to stop being an actress, to do something else... for me, the future is just a huge bunch of discoveries.
Audrey Tautou
The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness
Yann Arthus-Bertrand
If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy but we want to be happier than other people which is almost always difficult since we think them happier than they are.
Charles de Montesquieu
There are some delightful places in this world which have a sensual charm for the eyes. One loves them with a physical love. We people who are attracted by the countryside cherish fond memories of certain springs, certain woods, certain ponds, certain hills, which have become familiar sights and can touch our hearts like happy events.Sometimes indeed the memory goes back towards a forest glade, or a spot on a river bank or an orchard in blossom, glimpsed only once on a happy day, but preserved in our heart.
Guy de Maupassant
A girl without braidsis like a city without bridges.
Roman Payne
Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.
André Breton
Sadness flies away on the wings of time.
Jean de La Fontaine
He had a reputation in society as a man with a lively wit, whose gaiety was pleasant and formidable – which all gaiety must be in a society which would despise you if, while amusing it, you did not make it tremble a little. ("A Woman's Vengeance")
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
To accomplish our destiny ... we must cover before nightfall the distance assigned to each of us.
Dr. Alexis Carrel
She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.
Milan Kundera
A life spent waiting for your paycheck, measured out in work hours...A lifetime spent buying everything retail while selling oneself wholesale - L'amour Existe (1960)
Maurice Pialat
Personal life, expression, knowledge, and history advance obliquely, and not directly, toward ends or toward concepts. That which is sought too deliberately is not obtained.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
Blaise Pascal
The world embarrasses me and I cannot dream That this watch exists and has no watchmaker.
Voltaire
Whoever wants to know the hearts and minds of America had better learn baseball.
Jacques Barzun
It was not that Madame Santeuil's moral values had altered, but only her view of the moral values of others.
Marcel Proust
The reason why lovers are never wary of one another is this - they are always talking of themselves.
La Rochefoucauld
Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
Charles Baudelaire
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Voltaire
No privacy left. No manners.
Anaïs Nin
Victorious troops are those who kill more, and here we were the victims. This put the finishing touch to our demoralisation. The soldiers had lost conviction long ago. Now they lost confidence.
Gabriel Chevallier
I love luxury. And luxury lies not in richness and ornateness but in the absence of vulgarity. Vulgarity is the ugliest word in our language. I stay in the game to fight it.
Coco Chanel
You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.
Hélène Cixous
A true god surely cannot have been born of a girl, nor died on the gibbet, nor be eaten in a piece of dough... [or inspired] books, filled with contradictions, madness, and horror.
Voltaire