Quotes by French Authors - Page 19

Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the wealth they owe to science, our societies are still trying to practice and to teach systems of values already destroyed at the roots by that very science. Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence which he has emerged by chance. His duty, like his fate, is written nowhere.
Jacques Monod
He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
With you I understood that pleasure is not something you give or take. It's a way of giving yourself and calling forth the gift of self from another person.
André Gorz
Gifted Deirdre cast the spell that enabled our souls to eventually be reunited. She couldn't bear for us to be apart, and neither could I.
Hope Irving
All forms of dire poverty and brutality were things to forbid as insults to the fair body of mankind, every injustice a false note to avoid in the harmony of the spheres.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.
Arthur Rimbaud
The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.
James Goldsmith
In proportion as the mass of citizens who possess political rights increases, and the number of elected ruler’s increases, the actual power is concentrated and becomes the monopoly of a smaller and smaller group of individuals.
Paul Lafargue
Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.
Gustave Flaubert
To such an extent does passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character, which not only takes the place of our normal character but actually obliterates the signs by which that character has hitherto been discernible.
Marcel Proust
In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.
Voltaire
She spoke about it with such emphasis (somewhat affected) that I could see at once that I was hearing the manifesto of her generation. Every generation has its own set of passions, loves, and interests, which it professes with a certain tenacity, to differentiate it from older generations and to confirm itself in its uniqueness. Submitting to a generation mentality (to this pride of the herd) has always repelled me. After Miss Broz had developed her provocative argument (I've now heard it at least fifty times from people her age) that all mankind is divided into those who give hitchhikers lifts (human people who love adventure) and those who don't (inhuman people who fear life), I jokingly called her a "dogmatist of the hitch." She answered sharply that she was neither dogmatist nor revisionist nor sectarian nor deviationist, that those were all words of ours, that we had invented them, that they belonged to us, and that they were completely alien to them.
Milan Kundera
Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Everyone seems inspired by some religion that promises fulfillment. Within the clashing words we are all expressing the same impulses. We are divided over methods which are the fruit of our reasoning, but not over our goals, which are identical.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.
Victor Hugo
When you want to be well-liked in the world, you have to let a lot of people teach you things that you know and they don't.
Nicolas Chamfort
I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Oh you dear companionsElectric bells of the stations song of the reapersButcher's sleigh regiment of unnumbered streetsCavalry of bridges nights livid with alcoholThe cities I've seen lived like mad women(The Voyager)
Pierre Albert-Birot
It so happens that the world is undergoing a transformation to which no change that has yet occurred can be compared either in scope or in rapidity.
Charles de Gaulle
One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.
Jeanne d'Arc
It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death... And they should! ...For they are in life.
Roman Payne
There is no inconsistency when God raises up those who have fallen prostrate.
John Calvin
Youth is a terrible thing: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and fancy costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand
Milan Kundera
The gratitude of most men is but a secret desire of receiving greater benefits.
La Rochefoucauld
The more goods we acquire in the temporal realm, the more intense our external work, the less accessible and farther removed is eternity. Hence the limited perspective of active and energetic people, the banality of their thought and actions.
Cioran
The number and richness of man’s signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary…
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
O heavenly Father,protect and bless all thingsthat have breath: guard themfrom all evil and let them sleep in peace.
Albert Schweitzer
He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!
Albert Camus
Treat your entire audience with the same level of care.
Cendrine Marrouat
The heart has reasons which reason cannot understand.
Blaise Pascal
The spectacle is at the same time the mirage of self in the mirror of things.
Paul Ricœur
Do we ever have to abandon all hope? Is it not perhaps a good thing that by refusing to give in to the evidence, the dreams that lie half awake in us all may persist?
Théodore Monod
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.
Voltaire
rush of pine scent (once upon a time),the unlicensed convictionthere ought to be another wayof sayingthis.
Paul Celan
Somewhere I’d heard, or invented perhaps, that the only pleasures found during a waning moon are misfortunes in disguise. Superstition aside, I avoid pleasure during the waning or absent moon out of respect for the bounty this world offers me. I profit from great harvests in life and believe in the importance of seasons.
Roman Payne
We are more severe judges of our own acts... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.
Anaïs Nin
People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.
Albert Camus
It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.
Anatole France
Surviving makes other people’s tears unbearable. You might drown in them.
Marceline Loridan-Ivens
There is only one day left, always starting over: It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
Denis Diderot
One does not learn to suffer less but to dodge pain.
Anaïs Nin
If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it.
Albert Camus
There are only three ways to teach a child. The first is by example, the second is by example, the third is by example.
Albert Schweitzer
I was about as political as a bath towel.
Michel Houellebecq
Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence....
Michel Foucault
This is the shade of difference: the door of the physician should never be shut, the door of the priest should always be open.
Victor Hugo
It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.
Joseph Joubert
I am the other.
Gérard de Nerval
Is it by chance that the 18th century of France, the century of the "philosophy of enlightenment," did not produce any poets except the Marquis de Sade, who -- despite his participation in the events of this epoch -- expressed the first violent protest against the essential postulates of this period?
Benjamin Péret
But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.
Dominique De Menil
I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst-burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What's the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient infinite woman who...hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ...divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought that she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.
Hélène Cixous
Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be...
Jean-Paul Sartre
Joseph lost his son and Christ. (Joseph a perdu - Son fils et Jésus.)
Charles de Leusse
My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.
Michel de Montaigne
To change skins evolve into new cycles I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one's mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic living use.
Anaïs Nin
Let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all.
Albert Camus
One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes ... Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.
Roland Barthes
The earth is a great piece of stupidity.
Victor Hugo
Psychology is action not thinking about oneself.
Albert Camus