Quotes by French Authors - Page 16

Man can no longer live for himself alone. We must realize that all life is valuable and that we are united to all life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship with the universe.
Albert Schweitzer
The imagination serves us only when the mind is absolutely free of any prejudice. A single prejudice suffices to cool off the imagination. This whimsical part of the mind is so unbridled as to be uncontrollable. Its greatest triumphs, its most eminent delights consist in smashing all the restraints that oppose it. Imagination is the enemy of all norms, the idolater of all disorder and of all that bears the color of crime.
Marquis de Sade
The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.
Guy de Maupassant
Pie may just be the Madonna-whore of the dessert world.
Pascale Le Draoulec
A new dynasty is never founded without a struggle. Blood makes good manure. It will be a good thing for the Rougon family to be founded on a massacre, like many illustrious families."--Monsieur de Carnavant
Émile Zola
It is the same in life; the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune; but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.Lygiai taip gyvenime keičiasi ir mūsų širdis, ir tai skaudžiausia; tačiau patiriame tą skausmą tik skaitydami knygas, vaizduotėje; tikrovėje jos keitimasis, kaip ir kai kurių gamtos reiškinių vyksmas yra toks lėtas, kad nors ir galime konstatuoti kiekvieną atskirą būseną, paties keitimosi pajusti nepajėgiame.
Marcel Proust
...In the end, there's no sort of difference between dying from ignorance and dying under the feet of thousands of men who have regained their freedom. You close your eyes, and then there's nothing anymore. And death is never difficult. It requires neither a hero nor a slave. It eats what it's served.
Philippe Claudel
men are undoubtedly more in danger from prosperity than from adversity. for when matters go smoothly, they flatter themselves, and are intoxicated by their success
John Calvin
The poor young man must work for his bread; he eats; when he has eaten, he has nothing left but reverie. He enters God's theater free; he sees the sky, space, the stars, the flowers, the children, the humanity in which he suffers, the creation in which he shines. He looks at humanity so much that he sees the soul, he looks at creation so much that he sees God. He dreams, he feels that he is great; he dreams some more, and he feels that he is tender. From the egotism of the suffering man, he passes to the compassion of the contemplating man. A wonderful feeling springs up within him, forgetfulness of self, and pity for all. In thinking of the countless enjoyments nature offers, gives, and gives lavishly to open souls and refuses to closed souls, he, a millionaire of intelligence, comes to grieve for the millionaires of money. All hatred leaves his heart as all light enters his mind. And is he unhappy? No. The poverty of a young man is never miserable.
Victor Hugo
What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.
Blaise Pascal
The medals of the dead heroes are the coins for the future. (Les médailles des héros morts - Sont les pièces pour l'avenir.)
Charles de Leusse
Rien ne sert de courir il faut partir à point
Jean de La Fontaine
It is a misery to be born a pain to live a trouble to die.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux
Take patiently the petty annoyances, the trifling discomforts, the unimportant losses which come upon all of us daily; for by means of these little matters, lovingly and freely accepted, you will give Him your whole heart, and win His.
Francis de Sales
Humility is attentive patience.
Simone Weil
When individuals are close to God, love and desire to serve the Lord, the usual strategy of the devil is to cause them to lose their peace of heart, whereas God, on the contrary, comes to their aid to give them peace. But this rule is reversed for those whose hearts are far from God, who live in indifference and evil. The devil seeks to tranquilize such individuals, to keep them in a false sense of quietude, whereas the Lord, Who desires their salvation and conversion, will trouble and disquiet their consciences in an effort to get them to repent.
Father Jacques Philippe
Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
Gustave Flaubert
The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.
Anaïs Nin
People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they're talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time.
Milan Kundera
Men in prayer give greater license to their unlawful desires than if they were telling jocular tales among their equals.
John Calvin
Riches do not consist in the possession of treasures but in the use made of them.
Napoléon Bonaparte
…sense of futility that comes from doing anything merely to prove to yourself that you can do it: having a child, climbing a mountain, making some sexual conquest, committing suicide.The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as advertising: it is running to show you are capable of getting every last drop of energy out of yourself, to prove it… to prove what? That you are capable of finishing. Graffiti carry the same message. They simply say: I’m so-and-so and I exist! They are free publicity for existence.Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of weakness, harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance, endlessly self-evident.
Jean Baudrillard
I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
Roland Barthes
Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
Blaise Pascal
Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. This is why our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.
Albert Camus
Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.
Romain Rolland
If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect.
Milan Kundera
It is because of this sea between us. The earth has never, up to now, separated us. But, ever since yesterday, there has been something in this nonetheless real, perfectly Atlantic, salty, slightly rough sea that has cast a spell on me. And every time I think about Promethea, I see her crossing this great expanse by boat and soon, alas, a storm comes up, my memory clouds over, in a flash there are shipwrecks, I cannot even cry out, my mouth is full of saltwater sobs. I am flooded with vague, deceptive recollections, I am drowning in my imagination in tears borrowed from the most familiar tragedies, I wish I had never read certain books whose poison is working in me. Has this Friday, perhaps, thrown a spell on me? But spells only work if you catch them. I have caught the Tragic illness. If only Promethea would make me some tea I know I would find some relief. But that is exactly what is impossible. And so, today, I am sinning. I am sinking beneath reality. I am weighted down with literature. That is my fate. Yet I had the presence of mind to start this parenthesis, the only healthy moment in these damp, feverish hours. All this to try to come back to the surface of our book... Phone me quickly, Promethea, get me out of this parenthesis fast!)
Hélène Cixous
I was and I always shall be hampered by what I think other people will say.
Violette Leduc
France bleeds, but liberty smiles, and before the smile of liberty, France forgets her wound.
Victor Hugo
You risk just as much in being credulous as in being suspicious.
Denis Diderot
I have patience in all things – as far as the antechamber.
Gustave Flaubert
I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.
Albert Camus
Confidence is not a wilted plant that can be brought back to life with a bit of water. It is a highly flammable object. Doubt sets it aflame and destroys it irreparably.
Michèle Halberstadt
The woods, the vines, the very stones, were at one with the brightness of the sun and the unblemished sky, and even when the sky grew overcast, the multitude of leaves, as in a sudden change of tone, the earth of the roads, the roofs of the town, seemed as though caught up in the unity of a brand-new world. And all that Jean was feeling seemed without effort to chime with the surrounding oneness, and he was conscious of the perfect joy which is the gift of harmony.
Marcel Proust
Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which throughout his lifetime he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles.
Albert Camus
In symbolic exchange, of which the gift is our most proximate illustration, the object is not an object: it is inseparable from the concrete relation in which it is exchanged, the transferential pact that it seals between two persons: it is thus not independent as such. It has, properly speaking, neither use value nor (economic) exchange value. The object given has symbolic exchange value.
Jean Baudrillard
Knowing God without knowing our wretchedness leads to pride. Knowing our wretchedness without knowing God leads to despair. Knowing Jesus Christ is the middle course, because in him we find both God and our wretchedness.
Blaise Pascal
Faced with crisis the man of character falls back on himself.
Charles de Gaulle
Where flowers degenerate man cannot live.
Napoleon
I was born to be a remarkable woman it matters little in what way or how. ... I shall be famous or I will die.
Marie Bashkirtseff
It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.
Michel Foucault
Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice . . . . Truth breaks free, science is popularized, and religion totters; soon it will fall, in the course of centuries--that is, tomorrow. . . . In good time we shall only have to deal with r
Georges Bizet
Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
Charles Péguy
If you want to heal Heal othersAnd smile or weepAt this happy reversal of fate
Muriel Barbery
Here’s my usual party strategy: find the liquor, find the food, find the space where two walls meet. Alienate enough people around you to have some breathing room. Find the attractive people—this shouldn’t take long; they’ll be the ones getting everything they want in life. Once you’ve found them, stare hungrily at them all evening, and interpret every alarmed flicker of eye contact from them as a new stage in your relationship.
Isaac Oliver
There is something divine in mindless beauty, and Mersault was particularly responsive to it.
Albert Camus
I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct.
Marguerite Yourcenar
No one is more liable to make mistakes than the man who acts only on reflection.
Vauvenargues
I do not think that illegal plunder, such as theft or swindling — which the penal code defines, anticipates, and punishes — can be called socialism. It is not this kind of plunder that systematically threatens the foundations of society. Anyway, the war against this kind of plunder has not waited for the command of these gentlemen. The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. Long before the Revolution of February 1848 — long before the appearance even of socialism itself — France had provided police, judges, gendarmes, prisons, dungeons, and scaffolds for the purpose of fighting illegal plunder. The law itself conducts this war, and it is my wish and opinion that the law should always maintain this attitude toward plunder.
Frédéric Bastiat
Boredom is the most horrible of wolves.
Jean Giono
Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
You know, the immortality of the soul, free will and all that -- it's all very amusing to talk about up to the age of twenty-two, but not after that. Then one ought to be giving one's mind to having fun without catching the pox, arranging one's life as comfortably as possible, having a few decent drawings on the wall, and above all writing well. That's the important thing: well-made sentences...and then a few metaphors. Yes, a few metaphors. They embellish a man's existence.
Théophile Gautier
Man is this plural and collective unity in which the unity of destination and the differences of destinies are to be understood through each other.
Paul Ricœur
Generosity is the vanity of giving.
La Rochefoucauld
To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.
Jean Genet
I no more believe in simplistic solutions than I do in simplistic identieties. The world is a complex machine that can't be dismantled with a srewdriver. But that shouldn't prevent us from observing, from trying to understand, from discussing, and sometimes suggesting a subject for reflection.
Amin Maalouf
To win without risk is to triumph without glory.
Pierre Corneille
I say, `Woe to them that have a nose, a real nose,and come to look round the torture-chamber! Aha, aha, aha!
Gaston Leroux
Oh, Heidi! Heidi!" Marta exclaimed at last. "This is your garden. I know it even though you have not told me. Do you suppose in Heaven it is any more beautiful than this?""I sometimes think that Heaven is all around us, if we only have eyes to see it," Heidi said softly."And on the Alm too?" questioned Marta."Yes, and in Dorfli. Even in the chateau which seems so gloomy now. There must be a little Heaven there as well. And if not, Marta, why not make it so?
Charles Tritten