Quotes by French Authors - Page 36

The ascetic remembrance of death is opposed to akedia, to anxiety, to depression, and becomes a powerful reminder of eternity, its joyful nostalgia.
Paul Evdokimov
I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself
Simone de Beauvoir
It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas.
Charles Péguy
The memory of the dead is indeed a good remorse. (Le souvenir des morts - Est bien un bon remords)
Charles de Leusse
Quand tu veux construire un bateau, ne commence pas par rassembler du bois, couper des planches et distribuer du travail, mais reveille au sein des hommes le desir de la mer grande et large.If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
May a man live well-enough and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him.
Roman Payne
When I look at my life and at the secret color which it has, I feel as if tears were trembling in my heart. I am just as much the lips that I have kissed as the nights spent in the 'House before the World,' just as much the child brought up in poverty as this frenzied ambition and thirst for life which sometimes carry me away.
Albert Camus
Il pleure dans mon coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville.
Paul Verlaine
It is not the organs—that is, the character and form of the animal's bodily parts—that have given rise to its habits and particular structures. It is the habits and manner of life and the conditions in which its ancestors lived that have in the course of time fashioned its bodily form, its organs and qualities.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
The passions are the only orators which always persuade.
François de La Rochefoucauld
In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.
Simone de Beauvoir
Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are sham niggers, you, maniacs, fiends, misers. Merchant, you are a nigger; Judge, you are a nigger; General, you are a nigger; Emperor, old itch, you are a nigger: you have drank of the untaxed liquor of Satan’s still.
Arthur Rimbaud
It is better to enlighten men’s minds than to teach them to be obstinate in their prejudices.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Have patience with all things but first with yourself. Never confuse your mistakes with your value as a human being. You are perfectly valuable, creative, worthwhile person simply because you exist. And no amount of triumphs or tribulations can ever change that.
Saint Frances de Sales
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
We say sound things when we do not strive to say to say extraordinary ones.
Comte de Lautréamont
If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.
Simone de Beauvoir
(Priests) cheapjack merchants selling paradise
Jean Lorrain
It seems to me that the Russian prestige is declining and that America holds in its hands the immediate future of the world: as long as America knows how to develop the sense of the earth at the same time as her sense of liberty." [Written from Peking, October 1945, on the eve of departure, after having been stuck there since the war began.]
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
In the midst of the apparent diversity of human affairs, a certain number of primary facts may be discovered, from which all others are derived.
Alexis de Tocqueville
We forgive so long as we love.
François de La Rochefoucauld
This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.
Émile Zola
What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.
Voltaire
As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.
Roland Barthes
Then I made her understand that, where she was concerned, I was only a poor dog, ready to die for her. But that she could marry the young man she pleased because she had cried with me, and mingled her tears with mine. ~ Erik
Gaston Leroux
If you live long enough you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone de Beauvoir
Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
Simone de Beauvoir
Ah, youth!It was a beautiful night...The moon was out of orbit.The stars were awry.But everything else was exactlyas it should have been.
Roman Payne
I don't think success is harmful as so many people say. Rather I believe it indispensible to talent: if for nothing else than to increase the talent.
Jeanne Moreau
No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself.
Romain Rolland
True knowledge of God is born out of obedience.
John Calvin
The East is unfamiliar with those confessions, memoirs, and autobiographies so beloved in the West. There is a clear difference in tonality. One's gaze never lingers on the suffering humanity of Christ, but penetrates behind the kenotic veil. To the West's mysticism of the Cross and its veneration of the Sacred Heart corresponds the eastern mysticism of the sealed tomb, from which eternal life eternal wells up.
Paul Evdokimov
Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.
Voltaire
Scepticism is the first step towards truth.
Denis Diderot
The greatest thing you'll ever learn ... is just to love and be loved in return.
Moulin Rouge
Monsieur, innocence is its own crown! Innocence has only to act to be noble! She is as august in rags as fleur de lys.
Victor Hugo
Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.
Rémy de Gourmont
Love is the most selfish of all the passions.
Alexandre Dumas
Maybe those sailors will write bad poems, but the same men would have kept dull diaries, too. The problem has to do not with the evidence but with the witness. The point is not the adventure but the adventurer. Reality cannot be directly rendered. Reality is a pile of bricks that can assume many forms.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
If ever again we happened to lose our balance, just when sleepwalking through the same dream on the brink of hell’s valley, if ever the magical mare (whom I ride through the night air hollowed out into caverns and caves where wild animals live) in a crazy fit of anger over some word I might have said without the perfect sweetness that works on her like a charm, if ever the magic Mare looks over her shoulder and whinnies: “So! You don’t love me!” and bucks me off, sends me flying to the hyenas, if ever the paper ladder that I climb so easily to go pick stars for Promethea—at the very instant that I reach out my hand and it smells like fresh new moon, so good, it makes you believe in god’s genius—if ever at that very instant my ladder catches fire—because it is so fragile, all it would take is someone’s brushing against it tactlessly and all that would be left is ashes—if ever I had the dreadful luck again to find myself falling screaming down into the cruel guts of separation, and emptying all my being of hope, down to the last milligram of hope, until I am able to melt into the pure blackness of the abyss and be no more than night and a death rattle,I would really rather not be tumbling around without my pencil and paper.
Hélène Cixous
The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Innovation! One cannot be forever innovating. I want to create classics.
Coco Chanel
Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.
Roland Barthes
To achieve great things we must live as though we were never going to die.
Vauvenargues
That faith be analyzable does not necessarily imply a method for getting by without it. . . .
Julia Kristeva
Government is the right disposition of things.
Michel Foucault
Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
Marie Curie
Those honor nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything.
Blaise Pascal
If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us
Stendhal
Oh, mankind, race of crocodiles! How well I recognize you down there, and how worthy you are of yourselves!
Alexandre Dumas
I could no longer desire physically without feeling a need for her, without suffering from her absence.
Marcel Proust
Men? One never knows where to find them. The wind blows them away. They have no roots, and that makes their life very difficult.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
From this we conclude, that, to live in harmony and peace…we must trace a line of distinction between those (assertions) that are capable of verification, and those that are not; (we must) separate by an inviolable barrier the world of fantastical beings from the world of realities.
Constantin-François Volney
If we were logical the future would be bleak indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings and we have faith and we have hope.
Jacques Cousteau
Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted
Max Ernst
People quickly grow accustomed to being the slaves of mystery.
Guillaume Apollinaire
Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom
Charles Baudelaire
To provoke laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
Honoré de Balzac
Of course, these were only dreams. How could a sensible woman leave a happy marriage? All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude.
Milan Kundera
We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience
Honoré de Balzac