Quotes by French Authors - Page 143

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
Victor Hugo
I, the ordinary restless child, the plain adolescent, the commoner who had been a nun twice, would prove to be a Daughter of Heaven.
Shan Sa
Be advised that all flatterers live at the expense of those who listen to them.
Jean de La Fontaine
From time to time, too, and for the space of two or three paces, an image or an echo would rise up from the recesses of time: in the little streets of the beaters of silver and gold, for instance, there was a clear, unhurried tinkling, as if a djinn with a thousand arms was absent-mindedly practising on a xylophone.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.
Marcel Proust
If you are not feeling well, if you have not slept, chocolate will revive you. But you have no chocolate! I think of that again and again! My dear, how will you ever manage?
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal de Sévigné
This is true freedom: to be capable of leaving ourselves, crossing the boundaries of our little world to open up the universe.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
I took especially great pleasure in mathematics because of the certainty and the evidence of its arguments.
René Descartes
I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.
Marc Chagall
When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns it's back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.
Frédéric Bastiat
To take photographs is to hold one's breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.To take photographs means to recognize—simultaneously and within a fraction of a second—both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
When I voted, my equality tumbled into the box with my ballot; they disappeared together.
Louis Veuillot
Gula and Cali lie on their sides, their tiny adder-mouths showing the pink of their palates, their bodies throbbing with lustful and obscene dreams. The sky releases its burden of sun and color. Eyes closed, Catherine takes the long fall that carries her deep into herself, down where some animal stirs gently, breathing like a god.
Albert Camus
Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
Milan Kundera
Reading is an act of resistance. Against what? Against all constraints.
Daniel Pennac
If we walk steadily and faithfully...God will lift us up to greater things.
Francis de Sales
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable so with autobiography.
Hilaire Belloc
He did not seek to assume the mantle of Elijah, to shed a light of the future upon the misty turmoil of events or resolve the prevailing light into a single flame; there was in him nothing of the prophet or the mystic. He was a simple soul who loved, and that was all.
Victor Hugo
Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?
Roman Payne
Let us work without reasoning,' said Martin; 'it is the only way to make life endurable.
Voltaire
What a space between men their spiritual natures create! A girl’s reverie isolates her from me, and how shall I enter it? What can one know of a girl that passes, slow steps homeward, out of thoughts, she can form an empire, locked up in her language, in the singing echoes of her memory. Born yesterday of the volcanoes, of greenswards, of brine of the sea, she walks here already half divine.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Pure analysis puts at our disposal a multitude of procedures whose infallibility it guarantees; it opens to us a thousand different ways on which we can embark in all confidence; we are assured of meeting there no obstacles; but of all these ways, which will lead us most promptly to our goal? Who shall tell us which to choose? We need a faculty which makes us see the end from afar, and intuition is this faculty. It is necessary to the explorer for choosing his route; it is not less so to the one following his trail who wants to know why he chose it.
Henri Poincaré
I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits
Anaïs Nin
Affected simplicity is refined imposture.
La Rochefoucauld
everything is dangerous, nothing is innocent
Michel Foucault
The cabin will return to the soil when abandoned by its owner, yet in its simplicity it offers perfect protection against the seasonal cold without disfiguring the sheltering forest. With the yurt and the igloo, it figures among the handsomest human responses to environmental adversity.
Sylvain Tesson
Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy - love which creates life?
Émile Zola
Why was love such an addictive drug?Why did loving someone cause such suffering?
Guillaume Musso
Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
Hélène Cixous
Nothing succeeds like success.
Alexandre Dumas
The superfluous is very necessary.
Voltaire
I know where there is more wisdom than is found in Napoleon Voltaire or all the ministers present and to come - in public opinion.
Talleyrand
In a world in which everyone cheats, it's the honest man who passes for a charlatan.
André Gide
Then I probably fainted. The woman at the registration desk managed to put on a sympathetic expression afterward, as if she wanted to ask, "What are you going to do now?" I told her not to worry, I was really leaving, I was going home.But go home where? Without my children I no longer had a home.
Barbara Honigmann
You must now go home, where everything -- you can be quite sure -- will be falser than here....You must go now. You'll leave by the right, through the alley....
Jean Genet
I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes of the lepers at Chiengmai gave me the right to talk about it. To have seen! To have been there! Rubbish! The world is not a book, it proves nothing. The spaces one has crossed were dark corridors with closed doors. The faces of the women to whom one gave oneself up completely: did they speak for anyone but themselves? The cities of man are secret. One walks along their streets, one sees them shine under one's feet, but one is not there, one never enters them. The dusty fields inhabited by people who are hungry, who wait patiently, are paradises of luxury and nourishment; shining at a vast distance from intelligence, at a vast distance from reason. They are not to be subjugated.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning we feel a certain void. 'Nothing in the paper today ' we sigh.
Paul Valéry
The poor man retains the prejudices of his forefathers without their faith, and their ignorance without their virtues; he has adopted the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions, without understanding the science which puts it to use; and his selfishness is no less blind than was formerly his devotedness to others. If society is tranquil, it is not because it is conscious of its strength and its well-being, but because it fears its weakness and its infirmities; a single effort may cost it its life. Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure. The desires, the repinings, the sorrows, and the joys of the present time lead to no visible or permanent result, like the passions of old men, which terminate in impotence.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Playing along in the yard, The blue sky sparkles against the earthly green,Creating such harmony!A pond, nearby.Untroubled waters mirrors the ether's dreams.A grand echo of my Divine Heart!I am One
Arnaud Saint-Paul
We human beings build houses because we're alive, but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable, but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place, but that no one can replace either.
Daniel Pennac
And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anaïs Nin
One does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or - which is the same thing - when his goal is infinity.
Émile Durkheim
One of my objectives is learning more than is absolutely necessary.
Jules Verne
Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Brunettes are full of electricity.
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.
Anaïs Nin
Menacing lines of black tomorrows on the horizon.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
The answer of our prayers is secured by the fact that in rejecting them God would in a certain sense deny His own nature.
John Calvin
In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be.
Marcel Proust
To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
Blaise Pascal
A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch's crown.
Victor Hugo
By the work one knows the workman.
Jean de La Fontaine
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
Honoré de Balzac
In quoting others, we cite ourselves.
Julio Cortázar
In truth, to go for a walk with one's eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that right now they do most obviously exist.
Simone de Beauvoir
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent
Victor Hugo
Fear true fear is a savage frenzy. Of all the insanities of which we are capable it is surely the most cruel.
Georges Bernanos
The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.
Milan Kundera
There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances. The superior man espouses events and circumstances in order to guide them. If there were principles and fixed laws, nations would not change them as we change our shirts and a man can not be expected to be wiser than an entire nation.
Honoré de Balzac