Quotes by French Authors - Page 23

A truly virtuous man would come to the aid of the most distant stranger as quickly as to his own friend. If men were perfectly virtuous, they wouldn’t have friends.
Montesquieu
To breath the air of Paris preserves the soul.
Victor Hugo
Contradiction is not a sign of falsity nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
Blaise Pascal
Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. Once can only come and go. Back and forth.
Milan Kundera
This was the first time I thought of S— that day. Her music was beautiful, her voice was beautiful, her body was beautiful. Even the dirty little pads of her feet were beautiful. I cursed myself then. For once, heaven had sent me Beauty in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry down. How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death?
Roman Payne
The cinema is an invention without any future.
Louis Lumière
…is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change?
Jean-François Lyotard
There Albine lay, panting, exhausted by love, her hands clutched closer and closer to her heart, breathing her last. She parted her lips, seeking the kiss which should obliterate her, and then the hyacinths and tuberoses exhaled their incense, wrapping her in a final sigh, so profound that it drowned the chorus of roses, and in this culminating gasp of blossom, Albine was dead.
Émile Zola
One swallows the lie that flatters, but sips the bitter truth drop by drop.
Denis Diderot
forming the "hydrogen bond"... is dynamic, with the exchange occurring in a few billionths of a billionth of a second. Since water molecules can "lose" two hydrogen atoms and "win" two by way of their oxygen atom, they are on average regrouped in fours, and the network of water, whether in our glass or in our cells is tetrahedral. All the same, this arrangement is not perfect in liquid water (otherwise the water would be a solid crystal), and locally there are many defects in the network. Although the motif of four water molecules is the most common in "linear" hydrogen bonds, the water molecule sometimes has a "forked tongue" with bifurcated liaisons, which creates arrangements of three or five, or even two or six molecules. This variability prevents water from being structured over a great distance and enables it to remain in a liquid state at the ambient temperature.
Denis Le Bihan
I would have praised you more had you praised me less.
Louis XIV
Teaching is no joke, sonny! ... Comforting truths, they call it! Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards. Besides, you've no right to call that sort of thing comfort. Might as well talk about condolences! The Word of God is a red-hot iron. And you who preach it 'ud go picking it up with a pair of tongs, for fear of burning yourself, you daren't get hold of it with both hands. It's too funny! Why, the priest who descends from the pulpit of Truth, with a mouth like a hen's vent, a little hot but pleased with himself, he's not been preaching: at best he's been purring like a tabby-cat. Mind you that can happen to us all, we're all half asleep, it's the devil to wake us up, sometimes — the apostles slept all right at Gethsemane. Still, there's a difference... And mind you many a fellow who waves his arms and sweats like a furniture-remover isn't necessarily any more awakened than the rest. On the contrary. I simply mean that when the Lord has drawn from me some word for the good of souls, I know, because of the pain of it.
Georges Bernanos
To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.
Muriel Barbery
Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.
André Breton
During the last ten years of his life my father gradually lost the power of speech. At first he simply had trouble calling up certain words or would say similar words instead and then immediately laugh at himself. In the end he had only a handful of words left, and all his attempts at saying anything more substantial resulted in one of the last sentences he could articulate: 'That's strange.'Whenever he said 'That's strange,' his eyes would express an infinite astonishment at knowing everything and being able to say nothing. Things lost their names and merged into a single, undifferentiated reality. I was the only one who by talking to him could temporarily transform that nameless infinity into the world of clearly named entities.
Milan Kundera
On the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths,And walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat:Daydreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet.I will let the wind bathe my bare head. I will not speak,I will have no thoughts: But infinite love will mount in my soul;And I will go far, far off, like a gypsy,through the countryside - as happy as if I were a woman. "Sensation
Arthur Rimbaud
But that which fanaticism formerly promised to the elect, science now accomplishes for all men.
Gustave Flaubert
Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality.
Anaïs Nin
If virtue were its own reward it would no longer be a human quality but supernatural.
Vauvenargues
There are only two forces that unite men - fear and interest.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Though one believes in nothing, there are moments in life when one accepts the religion of the temple nearest at hand.
Victor Hugo
She always walked under the arches of nightsAnd everywhere she wentShe leftThe mark of broken things.
Paul Éluard
With me, everything turns into mathematics.
René Descartes
Il pleure dans mon coeurComme il pleut sur la ville.Tears are shed in my heart like the rain on the town.
Paul Verlaine
I'm sick and tired of having a forest and a torture chamber in my house... I want to have a nice quiet flat with ordinary doors and windows and a wife inside it, like anybody else!
Gaston Leroux
Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
Voltaire
God made the cat to give man the pleasure of stroking a tiger.
Joseph Méry
Might one not say that in the chance combination of nature's production, since only those endowed with certain relations of suitability could survive, it is no cause for wonder that this suitability is found in all species that exist today? Chance, one might say, produced an innumerable multitude of individuals; a small number turned out to be constructed in such fashion that the parts of the animal could satisfy its needs; in another, infinitely greater number, there was neither suitability nor order: all of the later have perished; animals without a mouth could not live, others lacking organs for reproduction could not perpetuate themselves: the only ones to have remained are those in which were found order and suitability; and these species, which we see today, are only the smallest part of what blind fate produced.
Pierre-Louis Moreau De Maupertuis
To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.
Claude Adrien Helvétius
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
Albert Camus
One day of happiness is worth more than a lifetime of sorrow .... Under ordinary circumstances, jealousy is a suspicion to the person who excites it and degrading to the person who indulges it.
Victor Hugo
I say, "it seemed to me," for from the depths of my past childhood, there now awoke in me the glimmerings of a thousand lost sensations. The fact that I was once more aware of my senses enabled me to give them a half fearful recognition. Yes; my reawakened senses now remembered a whole ancient history of their own— recomposed for themselves a vanished past. They were alive! Alive! They had never ceased to live; they discovered that even during those early studious years they had been living their own latent, cunning life.
André Gide
After he had fully determined that the young man was at the bottom of this state of affairs, and that it all came from him, he Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had laboured so much upon his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve all life, all misery, and all misfortune into love; he looked within himself, and there he saw a spectre, Hatred.
Victor Hugo
i've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle.
Jean-Luc Godard
They had nothing in common except for existing in the same time and space
Pascal Garnier
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Gustave Flaubert
Se ciascuno pensa solo a se stesso e non si fida che di se stesso, come volete che ci sia coraggio civile, dal momento che questa virtù si basa sulla rinuncia a se stessi? Coraggio civile e coraggio militare nascono dallo stesso principio. Voi siete chiamati a dare la vostra vita in un sol momento, la nostra si consuma a goccia a goccia. Da entrambe le parti è la stessa lotta, sotto forme diverse. Non basta essere onesti per far progredire il più piccolo paese, bisogna anche essere preparati; senza contare che istruzione, onestà, amor di patria non valgono niente se non c'è la ferma volontà di trascurare ogni interesse personale per dedicarsi al pubblico bene
Honoré de Balzac
The last advance of reason is to recognize that it is surpassed by innumerable things it is feeble if it cannot realize that.
Blaise Pascal
I was hungry and you gave me to eat; I was cold and you clothed me; come, possess the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.' He who is the the King of the poor and of kings will say this at His great judgment.
Francis de Sales
One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion
Voltaire
There are truths that are not for all men nor for all times.
Voltaire
It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.
Simone de Beauvoir
Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window.
Charles Baudelaire
We are never so happy or so unhappy as we think.
François de La Rochefoucauld
The luck of having talent is not enough one must also have a talent for luck.
Hector Berlioz
To limit the press is to insult a nation to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.
Claude Adrien Helvétius
The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.
Roland Barthes
I belong to a nation which for the past four years has begun to relive the course of her entire history and which is calmly and surely preparing out of the ruins to make another history…Your nation, on the other hand, has received from its sons only the love it deserved, which was blind. A nation is not justified by such love. That will be your undoing. And you who were already conquered in your greatest victories, what will you be in the approaching defeat?
Albert Camus
Why shouldn't a mystical theology be possible? 'I want to touch God or become God,' I declared in my journal. All through that year I abandoned myself intermittently to these deliriums.
Simone de Beauvoir
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
Michel de Montaigne
there is only one true heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it
Roman Rolland
The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.
Marguerite Duras
No doctor takes pleasure in the health even of his friends.
Michel de Montaigne
In the old days the worst part of my depression used to be the astonishment it caused me, the scandalized way in which I fought against it. Nowadays, on the other hand, I accept it cheerfully enough, like an old familiar friend.
Simone de Beauvoir
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
Jean Cocteau
Compulsive reading relieves the anxiety that comes from tramping through the forest of meditation in search of clearings.
Sylvain Tesson
Though sleep is called our best friend, it is a friend who often keeps us waiting!
Jules Verne
For the Word of God is not received by faith if it flits about in the top of the brain, but when it takes root in the depth of the heart . . . the heart's distrust is greater than the mind's blindness. It is harder for the heart to be furnished with assurance [of God's love] than for the mind to be endowed with thought.
John Calvin
The more grievous the sin, the greater the repentance, God was bidding His time.
Émile Zola
No place is ugly to those who understand the virtues and sweetness of everything that God has made.
George Sand