Quotes by French Authors - Page 2

He imagined himself lying there, unable to sleep, thinking of his mother, separated from her by the unresponsive blankets tucked too tightly round him, feeling the ceaseless thumping of his heart in the silence of the night, the irrevocability of absence, the rigid stillness of repose, the agony of solitude and sleeplessness. If the room was a prison, the bed was a tomb.
Marcel Proust
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
Albert Camus
All the objects which he contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if, in absorbing his dreams, they had delivered him from an obsession, they themselves were, in turn, enriched by the absorption; they shewed him the palpable realisation of his fancies, and they interested his mind; they took shape and grew solid before his eyes, and at the same time they soothed his troubled heart.
Marcel Proust
Every flower is a soul blossoming in nature.
Gérard de Nerval
Within this new work of art a creature from beyond the reach of Humanity has insinuated herself and now lurks there at the heart of the mystery, a power unimagined before our time.
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise?
Marcel Proust
Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted everything in fact which masks reality from us in order to set us face to face with reality itself.
Henri Bergson
[He] went on to say that during all those years he had done nothing at all, that all he had felt had been a need to live, to live actively, violently, noisily, a need to sing, to make music, to roam the woods, to drink a little too much and get involved in a brawl.
Edmond de Goncourt
The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
Milan Kundera
Paris, however―because of her purely fortuitous beauty, because of the old things which have become a part of her, because of her entanglement of buildings and tenements―Paris yields herself in discovery as an attic beloved in our childhood gave up its secrets.
Jean Cocteau
The only victory over love is flight.
Napoleon
We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.
Voltaire
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not allow it to grow on a branch that is too weak to bear it.
Victor Hugo
He'd call me false and faithless and I've always had a weakness for those two words; next to cruel, they're the nicest words for a woman to hear, and not so hard to earn.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up to the portholes. But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day, and she would listen to every sound, spring to her feet, feel surprised that it had not come; then at sunset, always more sorrowful, she would wish the next day were already there.
Gustave Flaubert
Come to the edge, He said.They said: We are afraid.Come to the edge, He said.They came. He pushed them,And they flew . . ."— Guillaume ApollinairetFrench poet
Guillaume Apollinaire
It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.
André Gide
We have come to the determination to die, all of us, rather than abandon our God, and our religion.
Jeanne D'Albret
We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I must not, like the quietists, reduce all religion to a denial of any specific action, despising all other means, since what makes perfection is God's order, and the means he ordains is best for the soul.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade
Violence is a symptom of impotence.
Anaïs Nin
What constitutes the pleasure of the traveler is the obstacle, the fatigue, the peril itself. What pleasure can there be in an excursion where one is always sure of arriving, finding ready horses, a soft bed, an excellent supper, and all the comforts one can enjoy at home. One of the great misfortunes of modern life is the lack of the sudden surprise, the absence of all adventures. Everything is so well regulated, so well meshed, so well labeled, that chance is no longer possible; another century of perfection, and each one will be able to foresee, from the day of his birth, what will happen to him until the day of his death. Human will will be completely annihilated. No more crimes, no more virtues, no more physiognomies, no more originality. It will become impossible to distinguish a Russian from a Spaniard, an Englishman from a Chinese, a Frenchman from an American. People will not even be able to recognize one another, for everyone will be same. Then an immense boredom will seize the universe, and suicide will decimate the population of the globe, for the principal spring of life—curiosity—will have been destroyed forever.
Théophile Gautier
We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.
Antoine Lavoisier
The cat that laughs is crazy. Man who does not laugh is below... (Le chat qui rit est un fou. - Homme qui ne rit est dessous...)
Charles de Leusse
One should embrace the artist's profession only after recognising in oneself an intense passion for Nature and the disposition to pursue it with a perseverance that nothing can shatter - thirst for neither approval nor financial profit. Do not be discouraged by the censure that might fall upon one's works - one must be armoured with a strong conviction which makes one go straight ahead fearing no obstacle. An unremitting task […] an unassailable conscience. (From a sketchbook of 1847).
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Life, faculties, production-in other words, individuality, liberty, property-this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.
Frédéric Bastiat
Familialism consists of magically denying social reality, and avoiding all connections with the actual flux.
Félix Guattari
While I am busy with little things I am not required to do greater things.
St. Francis de Sales
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
... she exclaimed, the innate respectability of the middle-class housewife rising impulsively to the surface through the acquired dilettantism of the 'light woman.'People who enjoyed 'picking-up' things, who admired poetry, despised sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour and love, she placed in a class by themselves, superior to the rest of humanity.
Marcel Proust
Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.
Albert Schweitzer
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.
Paul Celan
I already knew that I had the ability to free myself from hatred, and I viewed this as my most significant conquest.
Ingrid Betancourt
[Camus] "The meaning if my works: so many men are deprived of mercy. How to live without mercy? One must try and do what Christianity never did: to take care of the damned.
Olivier Todd
Not all poisonous juices are burning or bitter nor is everything which is burning and bitter poisonous.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Vodka goes well with a wintery perspective. Nothing else provokes such presentiments of falling snow except, for some, the communist seizure of the state.
Michèle Bernstein
Faut être drôlement heureux pour supporter d'être triste, drôlement heureux ou drôlement courageux, et moi je ne suis pas très courageuse, et je suis très très malheureuse.
Justine Lévy
That's what sofas are for: sit down, drink a cup of tea, talk of literature. At least that's how I see it.
Sophie Divry
I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.
Roman Payne
Imagination is the eye of the soul.
Joseph Joubert
But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.
Maurice Blanchot
God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.
Voltaire
When he came back, I hid my face within my hands. He said: "Fear nothing. Who has seen our kiss? --Who saw us? The night and the moon.""And the stars and the first flush of dawn. The moon has seen its visage in the lake, and told it to the water 'neath the willows. The water told it to the rower's oar."And the oar has told it to the boat, and the boat has passed the secret to the fisher. Alas! alas! if that were only all! But the fisher told the secret to a woman."The fisher told the secret to a woman: my father and my mother and my sisters, and all of Hellas now shall know the tale.
Pierre Louÿs
Man is a knot a web a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
And in any case...there are no more supernatural noises nowadays...
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.
Michel Foucault
Do great things, Laure, be happy, or at least do your best to be. Life is fragile
Antoine Laurain
...solitude is not to be recommended to everyone, for you have to be strong in order to bear it and act alone.
Paul Gauguin
...patriotism has become a narrow offensive sentiment which as long as it lives will maintain war and exhaust the world
Henri Barbusse
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
Honoré de Balzac
Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?
Milan Kundera
I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.
Victor Hugo
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
Louis Blanc
It is proved...that things cannot be other than they are, for since everything was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose.
Voltaire
The only certainty is death.
Guy de Maupassant
Education should be gentle and stern not cold and lax.
Joseph Joubert
…Having been, not only mutilated in our country, wounded in our very flesh, but also divested of our most beautiful images, for you gave the world a hateful and ridiculous version of them. The most painful thing to bear is seeing a mockery made of what one loves.
Albert Camus
Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds.
Antoine Thomson d'Abbadie
The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.
André Breton