Quotes by French Authors - Page 22

Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248)
Simone de Beauvoir
A good imitation is the most perfect originality.
Voltaire
Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.
Joanne Harris
We keep quiet about what we read. Our enjoyment of a book remains a jealously guarded secret. Perhaps because there`s no need to talk, or because it takes time to distill what we've read before we can say anything. Silence is our guarantee of intimacy. We might have finished reading but we`re still livingthe book.
Daniel Pennac
I die adoring God loving my friends not hating my enemies and detesting superstition.
Voltaire
Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.
Voltaire
In the closed world of the gynaeceum, despite the gardens and parkland extending beyong the horizon, despite the insurmountable walls separating pavillions and palaces, the tangled web of our fate was inescapable. Why did these women love each other to the point of madness? Why did they loathe one another so vehemently, and why did sworn enemies feel such horror and fascination for one another? Why should furious hate become obsession, then intoxication and the very reason to live?Because love and hate were the two heads of the demon.
Shan Sa
I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. Italways made me want to do just the opposite.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Latefor the present, I supposeaccentuated each timeyou see, quick enoughthis fraction of earthunderfootthat upright speechimprints,like the whole of beingresumesWe’ve hit on something like lightning strikes
Deborah Heissler
Do not be surprised,' she said. 'It is I, and it is not I; You shall find me again, and you shall lose me; Once more shall I come among you; for few men have seen me, and none has understood me; And you shall forget me, and you shall recognize me, and you shall forget me.
Marcel Schwob
The villages were lighting up, constellations that greeted each other across the dusk. And, at the touch of his finger, his flying-lights flashed back a greeting to them. The earth grew spangled with light signals as each house lit its star, searching the vastness of the night as a lighthouse sweeps the sea. Now every place that sheltered human life was sparkling. And it rejoiced him to enter into this one night with a measured slowness, as into an anchorage.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
We are, on earth, two distinct races. Those who have need of others, whom others amuse, engage soothe, whom solitude harasses, pains, stupefies, like the movement of a terrible glacier or the traversing of the desert; and those, on the contrary, whom others weary, tire, bore, silently torture, whom isolation calms and bathes in the repose of independency, and plunges into the humors of their own thoughts. In fine, there is here a normal, physical phenomenon. Some are constituted to live a life outside of themselves, others, to live a life within themselves. As for me, my exterior associations are abruptly and painfully short-lived, and, as they reach their limits, I experience in my whole body and in my whole intelligence an intolerable uneasiness.
Guy de Maupassant
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. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is.
Daniel Pennac
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
George Steiner
Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God. Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true sound wisdom consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.
John Calvin
And indeed we must seek the true rule of prayer in the word of God, that we may not rashly break through to Him, but may approach him in the manner in which he has revealed himself to us. This appears more clearly from the adjoining context, where Jacob, recalling the command and promise of God to memory, is supported as by two pillars. Certainly the legitimate method of praying is, that the faithful should answer to God who calls them; and thus there is such a mutual agreement between his word and their vows, that no sweeter and more harmonious symphony can be imagined. “O Lord,” he says, “I return at thy command: thou also didst promise protection to me returning; it is therefore right that thou shouldest become the guide of my journey.” This is a holy boldness, when, having discharged our duty according to God’s calling, we familiarly ask of him whatsoever he has promised; since he, by binding himself gratuitously to us, becomes in a sense voluntarily our debtor. But whoever, relying on no command or promise of God, offers his prayers, does nothing but cast vain and empty words into the air.
John Calvin
I gazed upon the earth and saw that a body, in its tender faithlessness, had located it in the sky. A splendid scarf of blood, looming above the abyss.
Joë Bousquet
Private property is redundant. "Public property" is an oxymoron. All legit property is private. If property isn't private it's stolen.
Gustave de Molinari
He had to accept the fate of every newcomer to a small town where there are plenty of tongues that gossip and few minds that think.
Victor Hugo
Atheism is a way of humility. It's to think oneself to be an animal, as we are actually and to allow oneself to become human.
André Comte-Sponville
Civil war... What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as 'foreign war'? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers? Wars could only be defined by their aims. There were no 'foreign' or 'civil' wars, only wars that were just or unjust. Until the great universal concord could be arrived at, warfare, at least when it was the battle between the urgent future and the dragging past, might be unavoidable. How could such a war be condemned? War is not shameful, nor the sword-thrust a stab in the back, except when it serves to kill right and progress, reason, civilization, and truth. When this is war's purpose it maeks no difference whether it is civil or foreign war - it is a crime. Outside the sacred cause for justice, what grounds has one kind of war for denigrating another? By what right does the sword of Washington despise the pike of Camille Desmoulins? Which is the greater - Leonidas fighting the foreign enemy or Timoleon slaying the tyrant who was his brother? One was a defender, the other a liberator. Are we to condemn every resort to arms that takes place within the citadel, without concerning ourselves with its aim?
Victor Hugo
Life begins on the other side of despair.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Night when words fade and things come alive when the destructive analysis of day is done and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.
Emil M. Cioran
The more sensitive the lunatic, the less able is he to resist this prying interest of the normal human being. I felt that Renée's change of key - to myself, I compared Renée to a sweet melody, a little flat despite its laborious harmonies - was approaching.
Colette
Who is that blond child laughing as he runs after his colored marbles? [my marbles]It's meAnd who is the poet writing this poem?That blond child who laughed as he ran after his colored marbles
Pierre Albert-Birot
10 persons who speak make more noise than 10 000 who are silent.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Ice-cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal.
Voltaire
Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.
Michel Houellebecq
To err is human, to persist in error is diabolical.
Georges Canguilhem
One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes’ argument “I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity.
Jean-Paul Sartre
From quiet homes and first beginning,Out to the undiscovered ends,There's nothing worth the wear of winning,But laughter and the love of friends.
Hilaire Belloc
In such an admirable position of the New World, man has no other enemy than himself.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I shall never again admire a merely brave man.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The slow pace of our perfection has to be borne with patience, provided that on our part we always do whatever we can to continue advancing.
St. Francis de Sales
We all live like cockroaches in the crevices of our imagination.
Raymond Federman
Commitment is an act, not a word
Jean-Paul Sartre
In our twenties we have conflicts. We think everything is either-or, black or white: we are caught between them and we lose all our energy in the conflicts. My answer, later on in maturity, was to do them all. Not to exclude any, not to make a choice. I wanted to be everything. And I took everything in, and the more you take in, the more strength you find waiting to accomplish things and to expand your life, instead of the other (which is what we have been taught to do) which is to look for structure and to fear change, above all to fear change. Now I didn't fear change.
Anaïs Nin
Love...no such thing.Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist. Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.
Arthur Rimbaud
The thing that attracted me about philosophy was that it went straight to essentials. I had never liked fiddling detail; I perceived the general significance of things rather than their singularities, and I preferred understanding to seeing; I had always wanted to know everything; philosophy would allow me to appease this desire, for it aimed at total reality;philosophy went right to the heart of truth and revealed to me, instead of an illusory whirlwind of facts or empirical laws, an order, a reason, a necessity in everything.
Simone de Beauvoir
The profits of good luck are perishable if you build on fortune you build on sand the more advancement you achieve the more dangers you run.
Marquis de Racan
Not being heard is no reason for silence.
Victor Hugo
The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them.
Marcel Proust
Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.
Victor Hugo
Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of painting and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.
Milan Kundera
As for men, they must learn bravery and live for Pleasure and for Beauty. More important than those two things should stand only one thing for him... Honor. A man's honor should be more sacred to him than his life — especially in our age, a time when very few men know what honor is.
Roman Payne
He lives happy and master of himself who can say as each day passes on, "I have lived.
Michel de Montaigne
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.
Milan Kundera
When I turn my mind's eye upon myself, I understand that I am a thing which is incomplete and dependent on another and which aspires without limit to ever greater and better things...
René Descartes
One might have said that reason made him flee from reason.
André Maurois
Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless creature?
Honoré de Balzac
It is much easier to extinguish a first desire than to satisfy all of those that follow it.
François de La Rochefoucauld
That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
Simone de Beauvoir
I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortiferous power: certain Communards paid with their lives for their willingness or even their eagerness to pose on the barricades: defeated, they were recognized by Thiers's police and shot, almost every one).
Roland Barthes
If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.
Joanne Harris
We are enjoined whenever we behold the gifts of God in others so to reverence and respect the gifts as also to honor those in whom they reside.
John Calvin
Contrary to what phenomenology—which is always phenomenology of perception—has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.
Jacques Derrida
Truth is the first casualty of war.
Sophie Masson
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.
Albert Camus
There is a certain kind of stupidity reserved for women's dealings with men.
Françoise Sagan