Quotes by French Authors - Page 40

The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced.
Simone de Beauvoir
Life is the sum of all your choices.
Albert Camus
Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. We lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year's time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings.
André Maurois
Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.
Michel de Montaigne
The man who can own up to his error is greater than he who merely knows how to avoid making it.
Cardinal de Retz
Do you wish men to speak well of you? Then never speak well of yourself.
Pascal
The greatest difficulty in antiquity with that of altering the law; among the moderns, it is that of altering the manners.
Alexis de Tocqueville
[There's] a number of questionable characters whose goal is clearly not to disseminate information, but to prolong their pathetic reign by controlling people through a highly-organized and continued engineering of ignorance.
Marc Vouillot
All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the mind of the man who secretes it. God knows that this Unknown Country has been hit off in verse a hundred times...Milton does it so well in the Fourth Book of Paradise Lost that I defy any man of a sane understanding to read the whole of that book before going to bed and not to wake up next morning as though he had been on a journey.
Hilaire Belloc
It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization.
Albert Camus
Life becomes harder for us when we live for others but it also becomes richer and happier.
Albert Schweitzer
The Ancient Mariner said to Neptune during a great storm "O God you will save me if you wish but I am going to go on holding my tiller straight."
Michel de Montaigne
I looked at it [revolver] as if it reminded me of a crime I had committed with an irrepressible smile such as rises sometimes to people’s lips in the face of great catastrophes which are beyond their grasp, the smile that comes at times on certain women’s faces while they are saying they regret the harm they have done. It is the smile of nature quietly and proudly asserting its natural right to kill.
Anaïs Nin
I have always hated crowds. I like deserts, prisons, and monasteries. I have discovered, too, that there are fewer idiots at 3000 meters above sea level than down below.
Jean Giono
the important people in our lives leave imprints. they may die or go in the physical realm, but they are always there in your heart, because they helped form your heart
Jules Renard
People who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all.
Milan Kundera
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.
Anatole France
All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager forces at the service of continuity. That everything should continue as usual is the bourgeois standard of a reality that is indeed bourgeois precisely because it is a standard.
Julio Cortázar
If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!
Charles Baudelaire
Je pensais de meme que notre jeunesse etait finie et le bonheur manqué. I thought too that our youth was over and we had failed to find happiness.
Alain-Fournier
It is important never to separate love and knowledge, compassion and wisdom. A wisdom without compassion is closed upon itself and does not bear fruit. A compassion without wisdom is a madness and a cause of suffering.
Jean-Yves Leloup
Well, I must endure the presence of two or three caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies. It seems that they are very beautiful.And if not the butterflies– and the caterpillars– who will call upon me? You will be far away. . . as for the large animals– I am not at all afraid of any of them. I have my claws.”And, navely, she showed her four thorns. Then she added:“Don’t linger like this. You have decided to go away. Now go!”For she did not want him to see her crying. She was such a proud flower. . .
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.
Milan Kundera
Much, maybe too much, has been written about literature. (I know better than anyone; I’m an expert in the field). Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define. Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, it limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant. Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave–a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend. Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak so openly as when we face a blank page and address an unknown reader.
Michel Houellebecq
Valor is stability not of legs and arms but of courage and the soul.
Michel de Montaigne
And do you know Monsieur Marius? I believe I was a little in love with you.
Victor Hugo
Whoever has received knowledgeand eloquence in speech from Godshould not be silent or secretivebut demonstrate it willingly.When a great good is widely heard of,then, and only then, does it bloom,and when that good is praised by man,it has spread its blossoms.
Marie de France
The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.
Victor Hugo
We are often more treacherous through weakness than calculation
François de La Rochefoucauld
And yet, it was still a performance. Odin and I both knew it. It was a kind of play, a dream of how things might have been if he and I had been capable of trusting each other for a change. And so we hunted, and sang, and laughed, and told heavily edited stories of the good old days, while each of us watched the other and wondered when the knife would fall.
Joanne Harris
As I remember his laugh, there was nothing mad about it, it was more like the laugh of someone who has been the victim of a practical joke, a farce in which he had believed until suddenly he realized his folly.
Guy Sajer
It's while it's being lived that life is immortal, while it's still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, its not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown. It's as untrue to say it's without beginning or end as to say it begins and ends with the life of the spirit, since it partakes both of the spirit and of the pursuit of the void.
Marguerite Duras
One cannot get rid of a good education, nor, unfortunately, of a bad one, which often is such because one has not wanted to defray the expenses of a good one.
Denis Diderot
One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.
Marcel Proust
All men are born truthful and die liars.
Vauvenargues
Doubt the man who swears to his devotion.
Mme. Louise Colet
There is no greater misery than false joys.
Bernard of Clairvaux
The advantage of travel is that after a while you begin to realize that wherever you go, most people aren't really all that much different.
Joanne Harris
Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
Roland Barthes
People do not see you, / They invent you and accuse you.
Hélène Cixous
Some people never have any luck. All at once, as though a thick veil had been whisked aside, he clearly saw the wretchedness―the bottomless, monotonous wretchedness―of his existence. The wretchedness which had been, which was, and which was yet to come. His last days indistinguishable from the first, with nothing ahead of him or behind him or around him, nothing in his heart, nothing anywhere.
Guy de Maupassant
Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs.
Hélène Cixous
It was there, in particular, that I confirmed the truth that love, which we cry up as the source of our pleasures, is nothing more than an excuse for them.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
And to every man has been assigned a good and an evil angel; one assisting him and the other annoying him, from his cradle to his coffin.
Voltaire
God! Is there anything uglier than a frightened man!
Jean Anouilh
Every man without passions has within him no principle of action nor motive to act.
Claude Helvetius
You must realize that men make war as much with the enthusiasm of those who want it as with the despair of those who reject it with all their soul.
Albert Camus
When we are no longer children we are already dead
Constantin Brancusi
For a trial is initiated not to render justice but to annihilate the defendant.Even when the trial is of dead people, the point is to kill them off a second time: by burning their books; by removing their names from the schoolbooks; by demolishing their monuments; by rechristening the streets that bore their names.
Milan Kundera
A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.
Charles Baudelaire
The first sigh of love is the last of wisdom.
Antoine Bret
I don’t think I’m made for any earthly kind of pleasure.
Claude Monet
It is a public scandal that gives offence and it is no sin to sin in secret.
Molière
It was a fossilized path: the will which had cut this gash out of these solitary places so that the blood and sap would flow there was long since dead - and dead too were the circumstances which had guided this will. A whitish and indurated scar remained, gradually gnawed away by the earth like a flesh that heals itself, yet its direction was still vaguely cut into the horizon; a language and crepuscular sign rather than a way forward - a worn-out lifeline which still vegetated through the fallow land as it does on the palm of a hand. It was so old that, since it had been constructed, the very configuration of the land must have changed imperceptibly.
Julien Gracq
She [Mme des Laumes] belonged to that half of the human race in whom the curiosity the other half feels about the people it does not know is replaced by an interest in the people it does.
Marcel Proust
Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy.
Alexandre Dumas
Better beware of the newly deadOf the white-handed ghostAnd the brightness of these lamps . . .wrote Luc Berimont in 1940, in Reign of Darkness.I’ve always felt the greatest reluctance to go anywhere near, to touch, a fresh corpse. For me, it’s an unseemly thing. Useless. Hostile. Cunning. Dangerous. The ‘presence’ is much stronger, more perceptible one hour after death than one hour before. By my observation, this was not the case with Heisserer.He was entirely absent from his head, his hands,his quivering body. He was gone instantly, unburdened of his absurd life, released.
Jacques Yonnet
He who would confine his thought to present time will not understand present reality.
Jules Michelet
My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.
Jean-Paul Sartre