Quotes by French Authors - Page 34

Do not wish to be anything but what you are.
Saint Francis de Sales
I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.
Anaïs Nin
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
Nicolas Chamfort
Being established in my life, buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in this transcendental field which was opened for me by my first perception, and in which all absence is merely the obverse of a presence, all silence a modality of the being of sound, I enjoy a sort of ubiquity and theoretical eternity, I feel destined to move in a flow of endless life, neither the beginning nor the end of which I can experience in thought, since it is my living self who think of them, and since thus my life always precedes and survives itself.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
I'm afraid to go into myself and see what's going on in there.
Muriel Barbery
Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones just as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire.
La Rochefoucauld
England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare,but the Bible made England.
Victor Hugo
Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.
Coco Chanel
Progress - the stride of God!
Victor Hugo
Life is no more than the repeated fulfilling of a permanent desire.
Alexandre Dumas
A 'civilization' that makes such a ridiculous fuss about alleged 'war crimes' - acts of violence against the actual or potential enemies of one's cause - and tolerates slaughterhouses and vivisection laboratories, and circuses and the fur industry (infliction of pain upon creatures that can never be for or against any cause), does not deserve to live.
Savitri Devi
Year after year of dirty snow and bitter winds… houses and whole districts of people who aren’t really unhappy, but worse, who are neither happy nor unhappy; people who are ugly because they’re neither ugly nor beautiful; creatures that are dismally neutral, who long without longings as though they’re unconscious, unconsciously suffering from being alive.
Eugène Ionesco
It is easier to know mankind in general than man individually.
La Rochefoucauld
Pride and curiosity are the two scourges of our souls. The latter prompts us to poke our noses into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved and undecided.
Michel de Montaigne
Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.
Louis Aragón
I really admire people who don’t need to live surrounded by lots of stuff. My bedroom is piled up with clothes and books, papers and photographs. I like to collect things, anything I can grab from wherever I’m travelling. I think it’s the sign of slight anxiety to always want something around you to represent a good moment you had, to hang on to the leftovers. But then they’re a pleasure to look at too, so it’s not all negative.
Isabelle Huppert
We magistrates find that reason is the easiest thing in the world to dispense with; banished from our law courts as it is from our heads, we delight in trampling it underfoot, and that is what makes our judicial sentences such masterpieces, since (although commonsense never presides in them) those sentences are carried out with as much firmness as if people knew what they actually meant.
Marquis de Sade
[W]hat is one to say of the writer who lies when he writes that he is lying?
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.
Anatole France
Only god has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us
Emil M. Cioran
Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is.
Voltaire
They are les misérables - the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need of charity?
Victor Hugo
Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.
Albert Camus
It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
Milan Kundera
There are some situations which men understand by instinct, by which reason is powerless to explain; in such cases the greatest poet is he who gives utterance to the most natural and vehement outburst of sorrow. Those who hear the bitter cry are as much impressed as if they listened to an entire poem, and when th sufferer is sincere they are right in regarding his outburst as sublime.
Alexandre Dumas
I’d like to have the chance to decide what my life will be like, I think that’s the best present anyone can get. The chance to decide what your life will be like.
Grégoire Delacourt
The sole social evil is darkness; humanity is identity, for all men are made of the same clay.
Victor Hugo
Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.
Michel de Montaigne
Cubism is a Cathedral of shit.
Francis Picabia
Suffering raises up those souls that are truly great it is only small souls that are made mean-spirited by it.
Alexandra David-Neel
And once the novelist has brought us to this 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 more abiding 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 most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slow course of their development prevents us from perceiving them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.
Marcel Proust
Be sure that you speak with unfeigned lips.
Marie de France
... which would enable him to prolong for the time being, and to renew for one day more the disappointment, the torturing deception that must always come to him with the vain presence of this woman, whom he might approach, yet never dared embrace.
Marcel Proust
There are few men who dare to publish to the world the prayers they make to Almighty God.
Michel de Montaigne
It is better to burn than to disappear.
Albert Camus
And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.
Charles Baudelaire
Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.
Jean Cocteau
Please-tame me!' he said.'I want to, very much,' the little prince replied. 'But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.''One only understands the things that one tames,' said the fox. 'Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me.''What must I do, to tame you?' asked the little prince.'You must be very patient,' replied the fox. 'First you will sit down at a little distance from me-like that-in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I cannot come to thee but by thee, I never come from thee without thee
Bernard
People living deeply have no fear of death.
Anaïs Nin
it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).
Jean Baudrillard
How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.
Coco Chanel
For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Innovation! One cannot be forever innovating. I want to create classics
Coco Chanel
I walked past her, thinking: Is this what happens to the youth of women? Those whom we have met in the past, if suddenly we desire to see them again, have they become old? Is the young woman whom we desire like a character on the stage, when, unable to secure the actress who created the part, the management is obliged to entrust it to a new star? But then it is no longer the same.
Marcel Proust
Having money is a way of being free of money
Albert Camus
Caroline, beside herself, dragged me down to her, her breast was against mine, and by a circular movement seemed to caress it. The pretty strawberries which crowned her breasts, jealous at meeting others as fair, endeavoured to engage them in combat.
Felicité de Choiseul-Meuse
There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.
Victor Hugo
Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
Simone de Beauvoir
Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.
Honoré de Balzac
The human mind adjusts itself to a certain point of view, and those who have regarded nature from one angle, during a portion of their life, can adopt new ideas only with difficulty.
Antoine Lavoisier
But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain.
Patrick Modiano
Whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others. We must all carry our share of the misery which lies upon the world.
Albert Schweitzer
I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.
Victor Hugo
When we take your person into account, you who are a young maiden, to whom God gives the strength and power to be the champion who casts the rebels down and feeds France with the sweet, nourishing milk of peace, here indeed is something quite extraordinary! For if God performed such a great number of miracles through Joshua who conquered many a place and cast down many an enemy, he, Joshua, was a strong and powerful man. But, after all, a woman – a simple shepherdess – braver than any man ever was in Rome! As far as God is concerned, this was easily accomplished. But as for us, we never heard tell of such an extraordinary marvel, for the prowess of all the great men of the past cannot be compared to this woman's whose concern it is to cast out our enemies. This is God's doing: it is He who guides her and who has given her a heart greater than that of any man.
Christine de Pizan
The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.
Blaise Pascal
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
Auguste Rodin
Flirting is the sin of the virtuous and the virtue of thesinful.
Paul Bourget
… I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.
Albert Camus