Quotes by French Authors - Page 15

the poet I saw once...but whose words have long beenin my mind, windows of invincible candles...
Nathalie Handal
Monsieur Bienvenu was simply a man who accepted these mysterious questions...and who had in his soul a deep respect for the mystery which enveloped them.
Victor Hugo
There is no fate which cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Albert Camus
We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them.
Albert Camus
Relegated as he was to a corner and as though sheltered behind the billiard table, the soldiers, their eyes fixed upon Enjolras, had not even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat the order: 'Take aim!' when suddenly they heard a powerful voice cry out beside them, 'Vive la Republique! Count me in.'Grantaire was on his feet. The immense glare of the whole combat he had missed and in which he had not been, appeared in the flashing eyes of the transfigured drunkard.He repeated, 'Vive la Republique!' crossed the room firmly, and took his place in front of the muskets beside Enjolras.'Two at one shot,' he said.And, turning toward Enjolras gently, he said to him, 'Will you permit it?'Enjolras shook his hand with a smile.The smile had not finished before the report was heard.Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained backed up against the wall is if the bullets had nailed him there. Except that his head was tilted. Grantaire, struck down, collapsed at his feet.
Victor Hugo
Ability is of little account without opportunity.
Napoleon
Beauty is one of the rare things which does not lead to doubt of God.
Jean Anouilh
Betrayal is beautiful.
Jean Genet
A diplomat who says “yes” means “maybe", a diplomat who says “maybe" means “no”, and a diplomat who says “no” is no diplomat.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
No man deserves to be praised for his goodness unless he has the strength of character to be wicked. All other goodness is generally nothing but indolence or impotence of will.
La Rochefoucauld
Income from labor [in the United States] is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere.
Thomas Piketty
We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.
Bernard Kouchner
We should ask God to increase our hope when it is small, awaken it when it is dormant, confirm it when it is wavering, strengthen it when it is weak, and raise it up when it is overthrown.
John Calvin
If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.
Voltaire
The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they development fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.
Victor Hugo
Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps, old snuff-boxes, or even to paintings and statues.
Marcel Proust
I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world
Gustave Flaubert
I cannot stand the company of men. They flatter or they judge. I can stand neither of the two.
Albert Camus
He was stabbed by memory, that tyrant which impinges upon our dreams and leaps at out throat as soon as we awaken.
Françoise Sagan
Happy are those who choose, those who accept being chosen, the handsome heroes, the handsome saints, the perfect escapists.
Julio Cortázar
With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated. How many men resemble the nettle!" He added with a pause: "Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.
Victor Hugo
I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Whatever is enforced by command is more imputed to him who exacts than to him who performs.
Michel de Montaigne
And as for myself, I tell you, I have had too much luck these last years. Do you believe that a man's luck can run forever? I know that it can't. For myself, I must somehow erect a bulwark against the ill fortune that is certain.
Gontran De Poncins
When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts. Naked now, he lay his full length over her. She enjoyed his weight on her, enjoyed being crushed under his body. She wanted him soldered to her, from mouth to feet. Shivers passed through her body.
Anaïs Nin
We must always have old memories and young hopes.
Arsene Houssaye
Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.
Denis Diderot
We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.
Anatole France
Vivi muito tempo no mundo das pessoas grandes. Vi-as de bem perto.Não fiquei com muito melhor opinião delas.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Saintliness is very odd. When people encounter it, they often take it for something else, something completely unlike it: indifference, mockery, scheming, coldness, insolence, perhaps even contempt. But they're mistaken, and that makes them furious. They commit an awful crime. This is doubtless the reason why most saints end up as martyrs.
Philippe Claudel
He had been searching for it his entire life. He had devoted himself to poetry to find it. Now, in the middle of his life, he found it. It was in the face of the love of his life, his daughter. She who had never blushed before, now blushed. And in that blushing, he knew, was the existence of God. That was the day her father learned what God was. God was pure beauty, God was his daughter’s face when she blushed.
Roman Payne
What you love too violently finishes by killing you.
Guy de Maupassant
... the kiss, the bodily surrender which would seem natural and but moderately attractive...
Marcel Proust
My dear fellow " Said Albert, turning to Franz " here is an admirable adventure; we will fill our carriage with pistols, blunderbusses, and double-barreled shotguns. Luigi Vampa comes to take us, and we take him - we bring him back to Rome , and present him to him holiness the Pope, who asks how he can repay so great a service; Then we merely ask for a cariage and a pair of horses, and we will see the Carnival in the carriage , and doubtless the Roman people will crown us at the capitol , and proclaim us, like Curtius and the veiled Horatius, the preservers of there country." Whilst Albert proposed this scheme, signor Pastrini's face assumed an expression impossible to describe.
Alexandre Dumas
From the intellectual point of view an abyss may exist between a great mathematician and his boot maker, but from the point of view of character the difference is most often slight or non-existent
Gustave Le Bon
Too often we forget that genius ... depends upon the data within its reach that Archimedes could not have devised Edison's inventions.
Ernest Dimnet
I was discovering that the most precious gift someone can give us is time, because what gives time its value is death.
Ingrid Betancourt
Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.
Jacques Barzun
True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary and nothing but what is necessary.
La Rochefoucauld
Democracy is a festival of mediocrity.
E. M. Cioran
Of course fortune has its part in human affairs but conduct is really much more important.
Jeanne Detourbey
I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.
Blaise Pascal
As it was a time of war between the Catholics and the Huguenots, and as he saw the Catholics exterminate the Huguenots and the Huguenots exterminate the Catholics--all in the name of religion--he adopted a mixed belief which permitted him to be sometimes Catholic, sometimes a Huguenot. Now, he was accustomed to walk with his fowling piece on his shoulder, behind the hedges which border the roads, and when he saw a Catholic coming alone, the Protestant religion immediately prevailed in his mind. He lowered his gun in the direction of the traveler; then, when he was within ten paces of him, he commenced a conversation which almost always ended by the traveler's abandoning his purse to save his life. It goes without saying that when he saw a Huguenot coming, he felt himself filled with such ardent Catholic zeal that he could not understand how, a quarter of an hour before, he had been able to have any doubts upon the superiority of our holy religion.
Alexandre Dumas
I am sure you would not understand if I told you my father is delightfully clear and selfish, tender and lying, formal and incurable. He exhausts all the loves given to him. If I did not leave his house at night to warm myself in Rango's burning hands I would die at my task, arid and barren, sapless, while my father monologues about his past, and I yawn yawn yawn...
Anaïs Nin
Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!
Alfred de Musset
Darks drifts covered the horizon. A strange shadow approaching nearer and nearer, was spreading little by little over men, over things, over ideas; a shadow which came from indignations and from systems. All that had been hurriedly stifled was stirring and fermenting. Sometimes the conscious of the honest man caught its breath, there was so much confusion in that air in which sophisms were mingled with truths. Minds trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of the storm. The electric tension was so great that at certain moments any chance-comer, thought unknown, flashed out. Then the twilight darkness fell again. At intervals, deep and sullen mutterings enabled men to judge of the amount of lightning in the cloud.
Victor Hugo
A 'dreamer' is one possesses the gift of dreaming by day. Sure, many dream at night, but don’t also small babies and animals dream at night? To dream by day and dream aloud: Is this not the reward for all the troubles we humans must face?
Roman Payne
You owe it to your loved ones as well as yourself to know and pursue your pleasures.
Mireille Guiliano
Prayer is the force as real as terrestrial gravity. As a physician, I have seen men, after all other therapy had failed, lifted out of disease and melancholy by the serene effort of prayer. Only in prayer do we achieve that complete and harmonious assembly of body, mind and spirit which gives the frail human reed its unshakable strength.
Alexis Carrel
A woman's perfume tells more about her than her handwriting.
Christian Dior
Not being able to govern events I govern myself.
Michel de Montaigne
As reason returned to me, memory came with it, and I saw that even on the worst days, when I thought I was utterly and completely miserable, I was nevertheless, and nearly all the time, extremely happy. That gave me something to think about. The discovery was not a pleasant one. It seemed to me that I was losing a great deal. I asked myself, wasn't I sad, hadn't I felt my life breaking up? Yes, that had been true; but each minute, when I stayed without moving in a corner of the room, the cool of the night and the stability of the ground made me breathe and rest on gladness.
Maurice Blanchot
The difficulties of life do not have to be unbearable. It is the way we look at them - through faith or unbelief - that makes them seem so. We must be convinced that our Father is full of love for us and that He only permits trials to come our way for our own good.Let us occupy ourselves entirely in knowing God. The more we know Him, the more we will desire to know Him. As love increases with knowledge, the more we know God, the more we will truly love Him. We will learn to love Him equally in times of distress or in times of great joy.
Brother Lawrence
WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.There is my desert.
Edmond Jabès
My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?
Arthur Rimbaud
It has never been given to a man to attain at once his happiness and his salvation.
Charles Péguy
Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?
Honoré de Balzac
One should want only one thing and want it constantly. Then one is sure of getting it. But I desire everything and consequently get nothing.
André Gide
Faith declares what the senses do not see but not the contrary of what they see.
Blaise Pascal
At the unconscious level, Americans believe that good people succeed, that success is bestowed upon you by God. Your success demonstrates that God loves you.
Clotaire Rapaille