Quotes by French Authors - Page 24

True love always makes a man better, no matter what woman inspires it.
Alexandre Dumas
All human wisdom is summed up in two words-wait and hope.
Alexandre Dumas
Pain anguish and suffering in human life are always in proportion to the strength with which a man is endowed. We will not pretend to say that Heaven always apportions to a man's capability of endurance the anguish with which he afflicts him...Suffering is in proportion to the strength which has been accorded in other words the weak suffer more where the trial is the same than the strong.
Alexandre Dumas
Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. (The perfect is the enemy of the good.)
Voltaire
Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?
Annie Ernaux
How shallow is the stage on which this vast drama of human hates and joys and friendships is played! Whence do men draw this passion for eternity, flung by chance as they are upon a scarcely cooled bed of lava, threatened by the beginning by the deserts that are to be, under the constant menace of the snows? Their civilizations are but fragile gildings: a volcano can blot them out, a new sea, a sand-storm.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Ransack the history of revolutions, and it will be found that every fall of a regime has been presaged by a defiance which went unpunished. It is as true today as it was ten thousand years ago that a Power from which the magic virtue has gone out, falls.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
Study is the child of silence and mystery.
Henri Murger
metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love
Milan Kundera
Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.
Henri Bergson
Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom
Gustave Flaubert
I like these people swarming on the sidewalks, wedged into a little space of houses and canals, hemmed in by fogs, cold lands, and the sea streaming like a wet wash. I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.
Albert Camus
Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it and it is grace itself which makes this void.
Simone Weil
Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from information and at the same time nothing is open to reflection -> Encyclopedias are impossible -> I would say: the more information grows, the more knowledge retreats and therefore the more decision is partial (terroristic, dogmatic) -> “I don’t know,” “I refuse to judge”: as scandalous as an agrammatical sentence: doesn’t belong to the language of the discourse. Variations on the “I don’t know.” The obligation to “be interested” in everything that is imposed on you by the world: prohibition of noninterest, even if provisional . . . .
Roland Barthes
Who then shall unravel all these subtle combinations? Who shall trace the exact dividing line that marks off one form of extremism from its opposite? It can be done only by a love of country and a love of truth. Kings and knaves will always try to destroy this love, for they shun reason and truth like the p
Maximilien de Robespierre
Until that day at the dress department Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literally everything for me – but a woman. Our love in the physical sense of the word had proceeded no further than the kissing stage. And even the way she kissed was childish (I'd fallen in love with those kisses, long but chaste, with dry closed lips counting each other's fine striations as they touched in emotion).In short, until then I had felt tenderness for Lucie, but no sensual desire; I'd grown so accustomed to its absence that I wasn't even conscious of it; my relationship with Lucie seemed so beautiful that I could never have dreamed anything was missing. Everything fit so harmoniously together: Lucie, her monastically gray clothes, and my monastically chaste relation with her.
Milan Kundera
Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.
Charles Baudelaire
If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it.Becoming: an agony without an ending.The older I grow, the less I enjoy performing my little Hamlet. The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death. If History had a goal, how lamentable would be the fate of those of us who have accomplished nothing!On the frontiers of the self: ‘What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I’. Events - tumours of time.Man secretes disaster.The secret of my adaptation to life? - I’ve changed despairs the way I’ve changed shirts. Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned.
Emil M. Cioran
Happiness is something you lay siege to, it is a battle like a game of go. I will take hold of all the pain and snuff it out.
Shan Sa
Excessive suffering brings with it a kind of dull insensibility and stupor....
Émile Gaboriau
No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree, but the safest way to make them respected is to make them respectable. When the law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law--two evils of equal magnitude, between which it would be difficult to choose. It is so much in the nature of law to support justice that in the minds of the masses they are one and the same.
Bastiat
We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
Albert Camus
The Devil teaches women what they are – or they would teach it to the Devil if he did not know.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
Sometimes the best answer to a question is another question. Is it not by asking questions that we stimulate each other to reach more deeply into our own source and, thereby, approach the Source, both together and in our different ways? (7)
Jean-Yves Leloup
Love . . . includes fellowship in suffering in joy and in effort.
Albert Schweitzer
The voice of human nature is nothing but one prolonged cry.
Alexandre Dumas
If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.
Charles Baudelaire
Faith consists not in ignorance but in knowledge and that not only of God but also of the divine will.
John Calvin
Now the night's breath responds to the sea, which I can scarcely hear from here, as it reminisces about its shipwrecks.
Joë Bousquet
In great affairs we ought to apply ourselves less to creating chances than to profiting from those that are offered.
François de La Rochefoucauld
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Jean Genet
Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.
Marquis de Condorcet
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.
Anatole France
The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.
Gaston Bachelard
When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness.
Anaïs Nin
On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.
Évariste Régis Huc
I simply took refuge among women. As you know, they don't really condemn any weakness; they would be more inclined to try to humiliate or disarm our strength. This is why woman is the reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal. She is his harbor, his haven; it is in a woman's bed that he is generally arrested. Is she not all that remains to us of earthly paradise?
Albert Camus
Once someone asked, when I was present, what constituted the greatest pleasure in love. Someone replied, naturally: in receiving. Another: in giving. Someone said: the pleasure of pride! someone else: the ecstasy of humility! All these muckers making like the Imitation of Christ. Finally, an impudent utopian was found who insisted that the greatest pleasure of love was in forming new citizens for the fatherland. Me, I said: what is uniquely, supremely voluptuous about love lies in the certainty of doing evil.
Charles Baudelaire
Of all the passions fear weakens judgment most.
Cardinal de Retz
I think I possess because I do not try to give,Trying to give, I see that I have nothing.
René Daumal
Daddy, I don't like military parades. I never want to be like those people who march rank and file to music - they were given brains by mistake.
Corinne Maier
Ouch! What are you doing, Karl, you broke my skull!
Marjane Satrapi
The art of putting the right men in the right places is first in the science of government but that of finding places for the discontented is the most difficult.
Talleyrand
People do not want more noise in their social media streams. They want entertainment, uplifting conversations, and products that last. Most importantly, they want to be taken seriously.
Cendrine Marrouat
When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker’s head if they’re not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it’s bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God’s face when it’s bitter
Gustave Flaubert
for a woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea
Honoré de Balzac
Often the prudent far from making their destinies succumb to them.
Voltaire
This cavern is below all, and the enemy of all; it is hatred, without exception.
Victor Hugo
To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one is to produce anything vital and hence lasting. All this disturbs me so much that I no longer like to be spoken to about it.
Gustave Flaubert
The truest way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Meditation is a powerful and full study as can effectually taste and employ themselves.
Michel de Montaigne
The paper is patient, but the reader is not.
Joseph Joubert
Never having been able to succeed in the world he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.
Voltaire
Even painful memories are ties that bind.
Milan Kundera
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
Michel de Montaigne
The air around you is filled with floating atoms, sliding down the Earth's spacetime curve. Atoms first assembled in the cores of long-dead stars. Atoms within you, everywhere, disintegrating in radioactive decays. Beneath your feet, the floor - whose electrons refuse to let yours pass, thus making you able to stand and walk and run. Earth, your planet, a lump of matter made out of the three quantum fields known to mankind, held together by gravity, the so-called fourth force (even though it isn't a force), floating within and through spacetime.
Christophe Galfard
If triangles had a God he would have three sides.
Baron de Montesquieu
Man cannot cherish his existence any longer than life holds out charms to him: when he is wrought upon by painful sensations, or drawn by contrary impulsions, his natural tendency is deranged; he is under the necessity to follow a new route; this conducts him to his end, which it even displays to him as the most desirable good.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.
Jean Rostand