Quotes by French Authors - Page 25

They courted the face on the screen, the face of translucence, the face of wax on which men found it possible to imprint the image of their fantasy.
Anaïs Nin
And, in fact, if these crimes appeal less to the senses, they appeal more to the mind; and the mind, in the last analysis, is the profoundest part of us. For the novelist, therefore, there is a new type of tragedy to be derived from these crimes, more intellectual than physical in character, which do not really seem to be crimes to the superficial judgement of old materialistic societies because they do not involve bloodshed, and murder is committed only in the sphere of feelings and manners.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
If we resist our passions it is more due to their weakness than to our strength.
La Rochefoucauld
There are times when a man should sleep entwined in the warm flesh of a woman, his flanks plummeting into the perfumed bedding while she lovingly rolls her sweet shoulders into his chest. Whereas, there are times to be stoic and solitary—sleeping alone on a wooden board with twill sheets and splinters that scratch the skin.
Roman Payne
Strategy is 5 percent thinking, 95 percent execution. And strategy execution is 5 percent technical, 95 percent people-related.
Professor Quy Huy INSEAD
Children are knives, my mother once said. They don’t mean to, but they cut. And yet we cling to them, don’t we, we clasp them until the blood flows.
Joanne Harris
Some, often without knowing it, suffered from being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch with them through the usual channels of friendship, letters, trains, and boats. Others, fewer these, Tarrou may have been one of them, had desired reunion with something they couldn't have defined, but which seemed to them the only desirable thing on earth. For want of a better name, they sometimes called it peace.
Albert Camus
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
Emil M. Cioran
A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.
Coco Chanel
Women are never so strong as after their defeat.
Alexandre Dumas
La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.
Julio Cortázar
Nature is never so admired as when she is understood.
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Today everyone on our side knows that criminality is not the result of the Algerian's congenital nature nor the configuration of his nervous system. The war in Algeria and wars of national liberation bring out the true protagonists. We have demonstrated that in the colonial situation the colonized are confronted with themselves. They tend to use each other as a screen. Each prevents his neighbor from seeing the national enemy. And when exhausted after a sixteen-hour day of hard work the colonized subject collapses on his mat and a child on the other side of the canvas partition cries and prevents him from sleeping, it just so happens it's a little Algerian. When he goes to beg for a little semolina or a little oil from the shopkeeper to whom he already owes several hundred francs and his request is turned down, he is overwhelmed by an intense hatred and desire to kill—and the shopkeeper happens to be an Algerian. When, after weeks of keeping a low profile, he finds himself cornered one day by the kaid demanding "his taxes," he is not even allowed the opportunity to direct his hatred against the European administrator; before him stands the kaid who excites his hatred—and he happens to be an Algerian.
Frantz Fanon
The relationship between truth and reason:"Truth cannot be reached by reason alone!
Maurice Blondel
It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated.
Hilaire Belloc
A few days later, I found my mother beneath the tree, motionless with excitement, her head turned toward the heavens in which she would allow human religions no place.
Colette
I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
Michel Foucault
Perhaps what I am about to say will appear strange to you gentlemen, socialists, progressives, humanitarians as you are, but I never worry about my neighbor, I never try to protect society which does not protect me -- indeed, I might add, which generally takes no heed of me except to do me harm -- and, since I hold them low in my esteem and remain neutral towards them, I believe that society and my neighbor are in my debt.
Alexandre Dumas
Here all guilt ceases, for it cannot cling to such flowers as these.
Gilles Deleuze
What he had loved in Marthe were those evenings when they would walk into the movie theater and men's eyes turned toward her, that moment when he offered her to the world. What he loved in her was his power and his ambition to live. Even his desire, the deepest craving of his flesh, probably derived from this initial astonishment at possessing a lovely body, at mastering and humiliating it.
Albert Camus
Life is spent hovering round our tomb. Our various sicknesses are but the winds which carry us more or less near to the haven. … Death is our friend, nevertheless we do not recognise it as such, because it presents itself to us under a mask, and that mask inspires us with terror.
Francois Rene De Chateaubriand
Let us not be needlessly bitter certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
E. M. Cioran
Until the day of his death no man can be sure of his courage.
Jean Anouilh
Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature.
Roman Payne
Now I realized that life supplies us with everything we need for the journey. Everything I had acquired either actively or passively, everything I had learned either voluntarily or by osmosis, was coming back to me as the real riches of my life, even though I had lost everything.
Ingrid Betancourt
We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seeded refusal of that which others have made of us.
Jean-Paul Sartre
You can tell who your friends are because they don’t prevent you from being on your own, because they illuminate your solitude without interrupting it.
Christian Bobin
You are your own refugeThere is no otherYou cannot save anotherYou can only save yourself.
Guillaume Musso
It takes a very great intelligence to breathe logical meaning into meaningless ideas.
Milan Kundera
The madness of the eyes is the lure of the abyss. Sirens lurk in the dark depths of the pupils as they lurk at the bottom of the sea, that I know for sure - but I have never encountered them, and I am searching still for the profound and plaintive gazes in whose depths I might be able, like Hamlet redeemed, to drown the Ophelia of my desire.
Jean Lorrain
The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.
Anaïs Nin
We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job...
Emil M. Cioran
Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.
Victor Hugo
I am a man who knows nothing, guesses sometimes, finds frequently and who's always amazed.
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Crime brings together honest men and concentrates them.
Émile Durkheim
Then, as tonight, he had felt lonely, but soon had learnt the bounty of such loneliness. The music had breathed to him its message, to him alone amongst these ordinary folk, whispered its gentle secret. And now the star. Across the shoulders of these people a voice was speaking to him in a tongue that he alone could understand".
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Love is tears of joy, this is the baptism of fingers. (L'amour, c'est larme de joie, - C'est le baptême des doigts)
Charles de Leusse
The best one can hope for is a government favorable to certain claims and demands from the Left.
Gilles Deleuze
The greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one's opportunities and make the most of one's resources.
Vauvenargues
Ultimately, what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me... is Death: Death is the eidos of that Photograph
Ronald Barthes
Intoxication, like sexual euphoria, is the privilege of the human animal.
Roman Payne
Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?
Paul Gauguin
I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it is a fact one doesn't come across many of them, and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That's why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victim's side, so as to reduce the damage done. Among them I can at least try to discover how on attains to the third category; in other words, to peace.
Albert Camus
Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.
Charles Baudelaire
The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.
Romain Rolland
It is at the family fireside, often under the shelter of the law itself, that the real tragedies of life are acted; in these days traitors wear gloves, scoundrels cloak themselves in public esteem, and their victims die broken-hearted, but smiling to the last. What I have just related to you is almost an every-day occurrence; and yet you profess astonishment.
Émile Gaboriau
Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it.
Michel de Montaigne
With God there is no need for long speeches.
Jane Frances de Chantal
The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses
Arthur Rimbaud
I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The first crime was mine: I committed it when I made man mortal. Once I had done that, what was left for you, poor human murderers, to do? To kill your victims? But they already had the seed of death in them; all you could do was to hasten its fruition by a year or two.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I wanted to create a voyage to the moon just for her, but what Ishould have given her was a real journey on earth.
Mathias Malzieu
There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race of men with the sensation of their own ephemeral insignificance and drives them mad.
Gabriel Chevallier
Your external circumstances may change, toil may take the place of rest, sickness of health, trials may thicken within and without. Externally, you are the prey of such circumstances; but if your heart is stayed on God, no changes or chances can touch it, and all that may befall you will but draw you closer to Him. Whatever the present moment may bring, your knowledge that it is His will, and that your future heavenly life will be influenced by it, will make all not only tolerable, but welcome to you, while no vicissitudes can affect you greatly, knowing that He who holds you in His powerful hand cannot change, but abideth forever.
Jean Nicolas Grou
Few are they who have never had the chance to achieve happiness ... and fewer those who have taken that chance.
André Maurois
Your story is not a picture of life; it lacks the elements of truth. And why? Simply because you run straight on to the end; because you do not analyze. Your heroes do this thing or that from this or that motive, which you assign without ever a thought of dissecting their mental and moral natures. Our feelings, you must remember, are far more complex than all that. In real life every act is theresultant of a hundred thoughts that come and go, and theseyou must study, each by itself, if you would create a livingcharacter. 'But,' you will say, 'in order to note these fleetingthoughts one must know them, must be able to follow them in their capricious meanderings.You have simply to make use of hypnotism, electrical or human, which gives one a two-fold being, setting free the witness-personality so that it may see, understand, and remember the reasons which determine the personality that acts.
Jules Verne
Progress is not accomplished in one stage.
Victor Hugo
Friendship requires great communication.
Saint Francis de Sales
Women have always been the strong ones of the world. The men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on. They are always longing for the mother who held them as infants.
Coco Chanel