Quotes by French Authors - Page 41

Sometimes, Miss Jarmond, it's not easy to bring back the past. There are unpleasant surprises. The truth is harder than ignorance
Tatiana de Rosnay
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.
Eric Cantona
Don't worry so much about 'not supposed to'.
Joanne Harris
Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.
Blaise Pascal
Until he extends his circle of compassion to all living things man will not find peace.
Albert Schweitzer
He who lives without folly is not as wise as he thinks.
La Rochefoucauld
You alone in Europe are not ancient oh ChristianityThe most modern European is you Pope Pius XAnd you whom the windows observe shame keeps youFrom entering a church and confessing this morningYou read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloudThat's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapersThere are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteriesPortraits of great men and a thousand different headlines("Zone")
Guillaume Apollinaire
It should be said that my parents had married for love. The affection and devotion they had shared was the rarest of indulgences, perhaps especially in those days. For them, it had been love at first sight, and so my mother's death shattered my father. That it only dimmed his light rather than snuffed it out altogether was a miracle in and of itself. ~The Peacemakers ~(The Nemesis Engines)
Olivier A. Blanchard
Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.
Joseph Joubert
It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. (...) The "Tell the truth!" imperative drummed into us so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman.
Milan Kundera
If you aren't rich you should always look useful.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends.
Jacques Delille
Plain English - everybody loves it demands it - from the other fellow.
Jacques Barzun
I had, therefore, to resign myself to commissioning a duplicate from a jeweller in Madrid. They did the work very nicely. The claws are curiously shaped, but the true marvel is the stone; it is so very limpid and weighs many carats, but notice also how it is hollowed out! You see that drop of green oil which takes the place of the internal tear? It is a drop of poison, an Indian toxin which strikes so rapidly and so corrosively that it only requires to come into momentary contact with one of a man's mucous membranes to rob him of his senses and induce rigour mortis.'It is instant death, certain but painless suicide, that I carry in this emerald. One bite' - and Ethal made as if to raise the ring to his lips - 'and with a single bound one has quit the mundane world of base instincts and crude works, to enter eternity.'Look upon the truest of friends: a deus ex machina which defies public opinion and cheats the police of their prey...'He laughed briefly. 'After all, we live in difficult times, and today's magistrates are so very meticulous. Salute as I do, my dear friend, the poison which saves and delivers. It is at your service, if ever the day should come when you are weary of life!
Jean Lorrain
Empires come and go. Chanterelles are timeless
Sylvain de Ville-Amois
Our lives are like these things I make. Turn 'em, build 'em, bake 'em in fire. That's what you've been, son. Baked and fired. But a pot don't have the right to choose whether he be for water, wine, or just left empty. You have, son. You have.
Joanne Harris
People pretend not to like grapes when the vines are too high for them to reach.
Marguerite de Navarre
A single word often betrays a great design.
Jean Baptiste Racine
The probability of an event is the reason we have to believe that it has taken place, or that it will take place.The measure of the probability of an event is the ratio of the number of cases favourable to that event, to the total number of cases favourable or contrary, and all equally possible.
Siméon Denis Poisson
He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend- provided of course he really is dead.
Voltaire
As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.
Roland Barthes
When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement.
Max Ernst
If you are a Buddhist, inspire yourself by thinking of the bodhisattva. If you are a Christian, think of the Christ, who came not to be served by others but to serve them in joy, in peace, and in generosity. For these things, these are not mere words, but acts, which go all the way, right up to their last breath. Even their death is a gift, and resurrection is born from this kind of death. (157)
Jean-Yves Leloup
I go to seek a Great Perhaps.
François Rabelais
You must know that I am made of death, from head to foot, and it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!
Gaston Leroux
I regard myself as the most wretched of all men, stinking and covered with sores, and as one who has committed all sorts of crimes against his King. Overcome by remorse, I confess all my wickedness to Him, ask His pardon and abandon myself entirely to Him to do with as He will. But this King, filled with goodness and mercy, far from chastising me, lovingly embraces me, makes me eat at His table, serves me with His own hands, gives me the keys of His treasures and treats me as His favorite. He talks with me and is delighted with me in a thousand and one ways; He forgives me and relieves me of my principle bad habits without talking about them; I beg Him to make me according to His heart and always the more weak and despicable I see myself to be, the more beloved I am of God.
Brother Lawrence
At the moment when, ordinarily, there was still an hour to be lived through before meal-time sounded, we would all know that in a few seconds we should see the endives make their precocious appearance, followed by the special favour of an omelette, an unmerited steak. The return of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those petty occurrences, intra-mural, localised, almost civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind of national unity, and become the favourite theme for conversation, for pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be embroidered as the narrator pleases; it would have provided a nucleus, ready-made, for a legendary cycle, if any of us had had the epic mind.
Marcel Proust
The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds
Alfred de Vigny
Humor is an affirmation of dignity a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.
Romain Gary
Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.
Jean Anouilh
The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fills the sight by force(i), and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so).
Roland Barthes
Cowardice is the mother of cruelty.
Michel de Montaigne
It takes all of this technology to come up here and understand the simplicity of things. From here, it’s really difficult to understand borders, wars, and hate.
Thomas Pesquet (French astronaut)
I remind you that I have no faith. If I sought God, I find myself.
Henry de Montherlant
I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
Antonin Artaud
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Milan Kundera
Women have a passion for mathematics. They divide their age in half, double the price of their clothes, and always add at least five years to the age of their best friend.
Marcel Achard
There are more defects in temperament than in the mind.
François de La Rochefoucauld
It was then between one o'clock in the morning and half-past that hour; the sky soon cleared a bit before me, and the lunar crescent peeped out from behind the clouds - that sad crescent of the last quarter of the moon. The crescent of the new moon, that which rises at four or five o'clock in the evening, is clear, bright and silvery; but that which rises after midnight is red, sinister and disquieting; it is the true crescent of the witches' Sabbath: all night-walkers must have remarked the contrast. The first, even when it is as narrow as a silver thread, projects a cheery ray, which rejoices the heart, and casts on the ground sharply defined shadows; while the latter reflects only a mournful glow, so wan that the shadows are bleared and indistinct. ("Who Knows?")
Guy de Maupassant
The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.
Jacques Monod
The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive… compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.
Guy Debord
Nature says to a woman: 'Be beautiful if you can wise if you want to but be respected that is essential.'
Pierre Beaumarchais
Don't you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you've surely heard about those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil which attack the swimmer by the thousands, eat him up in a few moments in quick little mouthfuls and leave only a perfectly clean skeleton behind? So, that's the way they're constituted. 'Do you want a clean life, like everyone else?' Of course the answer is yes. How could you not? 'Fine. We'll clean you up. Here's a job, here's a family, here's some organized leisure.' And the little teeth bite into the flesh, right down to the bone. But i'm being unfair. I shouldn't have said, 'the way they're constituted', because after all, it's our way, too: it's a case of who strips whom.
Albert Camus
Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness. If they are happy by surprise, they find themselves disabled, unhappy to be deprived of their unhappiness.
Albert Camus
England has forty-two religions and only two sauces.
Voltaire
I took her to bed with silk and song'Lay still, my love, I won’t be long,I must prepare my body for passion.''O, your body you give, but all else you ration...
Roman Payne
I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only anoblique consideration will be found here of man; it’s up to him to saywhere his masculinity and femininity are at: this will concern us oncemen have opened their eyes and seen themselves clearly.
Hélène Cixous
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
Honoré de Balzac
Statesmen should remember that they have been elected to persuade and to lead, and not just to accept as fixed the momentary moods and pernicious prejudices of the public.
Stanley Hoffmann
The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.
Simone de Beauvoir
If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination.
Roman Payne
Death after all is only a matter of a few hours, a few minutes, but a pension is like poverty, it lasts a whole lifetime. Rich people are drunk in a different way, they can't understand this frenzy about security. Being rich is another kind of drunkenness, the forgetful kind. That, in fact, is the whole point of getting rich: to forget.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The present is always the best, even when its rough.
Julien Torma
She was a free bird one minute: queen of the world and laughing. The next minute she would be in tears like a porcelain angel, about to teeter, fall and break. She never cried because she was afraid that something 'would' happen; she would cry because she feared something that could render the world more beautiful, 'would not' happen.
Roman Payne
The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.” ― Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.
Émile Zola
NEWSPAPER: What great paper is the Earth; what a typeface is the Day; what ink is the Night! – Everyone prints, everyone reads; no one understands.
Xavier Forneret
Knowledge [savoir] in general cannot be reduced to science, nor even to learning [connaissance]. Learning is the set of statements which, to the exclusion of all other statements, denote or describe objects and may be declared true or false. Science is a subset of learning. It is also composed of denotative statements, but imposes two supplementary conditions on their acceptability: the objects to which they refer must be available for repeated access, in other words, they must be accessible in explicit conditions of observation; and it must be possible to decide whether or not a given statement pertains to the language judged relevant by the experts.
Jean-François Lyotard