Quotes by French Authors - Page 44

I am going to die, but that is of no importance.
Muriel Barbery
The first days of January 1942 brought enormous amounts of snow. The reader already knows what snow meant for the clergy. But this time the torture surpassed the bounds of the endurable. At the same time the thermometer hovered between 5 and 15 degrees below zero. From morning till night we scraped, shoveled, and pushed wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of snow to the brook. The work detail consisted of more than 1,000 clergymen, forced to keep moving by SS men and Capos who kicked us and beat us with truncheons.We had to make rounds with the wheelbarrows from the assembly square to the brook and back. Not a moment of rest was allowed, and much of the time we were forced to run.At one point I tripped over my barrow and fell, and it took me a while to get up again. An SS man dashed over and ordered me to turn with the full load. He ran beside me, beating me constantly with a leather strap. When I got to the brook I was not allowed to dump out the heavy snow, but had to make a second complete round with it instead.When the guard finally went off and I tried to let go of the wheelbarrow, I found that one of my hands was frozen fast to it. I had to blow on it with warm breath to get it free.
Jean Bernard
Faith is the little night-light that burns in a sick-room as long as it is there the obscurity is not complete we turn towards it and await the daylight.
Abbe Henri Huvelin
We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck and ask anyone the house is never burgled and the ship never goes down.
Jean Anouilh
The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.
Guy Debord
The life of a human being on this earth is very short - the years fly by - and the opportunity is past - forever. You know that the ONLY REASON for a human being's life on this earth is to attain to the Knowledge of God - all else is nothing, all else passes away as a wind passes away.
Violette Nakhjavani
We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.
Albert Schweitzer
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
Honoré de Balzac
The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.
Anaïs Nin
I never swear, Monseigneur. I say Yes or No, and as I am a gentleman, I keep my word.
Alexandre Dumas
Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.
Roman Payne
What is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies. The fact of being quick or slow isn’t really relevant.
Laurent Schwartz
A creature that hides and “withdraws into its shell,” is preparing a “way out.” This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent. If we remain at the heart of the image under consideration, we have the impression that, by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, of being.
Gaston Bachelard
Everyone rushes wherever his instincts impel him, the populace swarms like insects over a corpse, poets pass by without having the time to sculpt their thoughts, hardly have they scribbled their ideas down on sheets of paper than the sheets are blown away; everything glitters and everything resounds in this masquerade, beneath its ephemeral royalties and its cardboard scepters, gold flows, wine cascades, cold debauchery lifts her skirts and jigs around…horror! horror! and then there hangs over it all a veil that each one grabs part of to hide himself the best he can. Derision! Horror – horror!
Gustave Flaubert
But this time is ours, and we cannot live hating ourselves
Albert Camus
In fact living is dying.
Guy de Maupassant
The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell. Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything.
Emil M. Cioran
For we may remark generally of our mathematical researches, that these auxiliary quantities, these long and difficult calculations into which we are often drawn, are almost always proofs that we have not in the beginning considered the objects themselves so thoroughly and directly as their nature requires, since all is abridged and simplified, as soon as we place ourselves in a right point of view.
Louis Poinsot
He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.
André Gide
The happiness which is lacking makes one think even the happiness one has unbearable.
Joseph Roux
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
Milan Kundera
Pleasure is the object duty and the goal of all rational creatures.
Voltaire
We are not to look to what men in themselves deserve but to attend to the image of God which exists in all and to which we owe all honor and love.
John Calvin
Our relationship with literary characters, at least to those that exercise a certain attraction over us, rests in fact on a denial. We know perfectly well, on a conscious level, that these characters “do not exist,” or in any case do not exist in the same way as do the inhabitants of the real world. But things manifest in an entirely different way on the unconscious level, which is interested not in the ontological differences between worlds but in the effect they produce on the psyche.Every psychoanalyst knows how deeply a subject can be influenced, and even shaped, sometimes to the point of tragedy, by a fictional character and the sense of identification it gives rise to. This remark must first of all be understood as a reminder that we ourselves are usually fictional characters for other people […]
Pierre Bayard
Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise natural selection alone and unaided could have drawn all the music of the biosphere. In effect natural selection operates upon the products of chance and can feed nowhere else; but it operates in a domain of very demanding conditions, and from this domain chance is barred. It is not to chance but to these conditions that evolution owes its generally progressive course, its successive conquests, and the impression it gives of a smooth and steady unfolding.
Jacques Monod
The only real elegance is in the mind if you've got that the rest really comes from it.
Diana Vreeland
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
Anaïs Nin
— How do you make your pictures? — I don’t know, it’s not important.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Doubt is not a pleasant state but certainty is a ridiculous one.
Voltaire
Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.
Victor Hugo
Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses. By thy might, there return into us treasures that we had abandoned. By thy grace, there are released in us all the dried-up runnels of our heart. Of the riches that exist in the world, thou art the rarest and also the most delicate - thou so pure within the bowels of the earth! A man may die of thirst lying beside a magnesian spring. He may die within reach of a salt lake. He may die though he hold in his hand a jug of dew, if it be inhabited by evil salts. For thou, water, art a proud divinity, allowing no alteration, no foreignness in thy being. And the joy that thou spreadest is an infinitely simple joy.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
One sees intelligence far more than one hears it. People do not always say transcendental things but if they are capable of saying them it is always visible.
Marie Leneru
Love is above all the gift of oneself.
Jean Anouilh
Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.
Louis Pasteur
An optimist is a man who plant two acorns and buy a hammock.
Jean de Lattre de Tassigny
It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.
Voltaire
I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
Jean Cocteau
All our final resolutions are made in a state of mind which is not going to last.
Marcel Proust
There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.
Louis Althusser
In such blue beauty you sense the darkness into which the light will soon fall, and in this conjugal life of blue and black you find the one lesson of things that suits you, the proof of a certain excellence in this life where everything is given to us, every instant, blue with black, strength with hurt.
Christian Bobin
If it is ones lot to be cast among fools, one must learn foolishness.
Alexandre Dumas
It is necessary ... to yield to the storm, purchase a peace, and wait patiently for better times.
Alexandre Dumas
Decline is also a form of voluptuousness, just like growth. Autumn is just as sensual as springtime. There is as much greatness in dying as in procreation.
Iwan Goll
And as we know from the pilgrimage diaries of Swami Ramdas, it is when we renounce everything that everything is given to us, in abundance. Everything: meaning the intensity of presence itself.
Frédéric Gros
And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.
Albert Camus
In Sanskrit, there exists no word for ‘The Individual’ (L’Individu). En Grèce antique, il n’y avait aucun mot pour dire ‘Devoir’ (Duty). In French, the word for ‘Wife’ is the same as the word for ‘Woman.’ En anglais, nous n’avons aucun mot semblable à l’exquise ‘Jouissance!
Roman Payne
For what is love if one loves a woman without knowing her? Just a decision to love? Or even an imitation? The question concerns us all: If, from our childhood on, the examples of love were not there inviting us to copy them, would we know what "loving" means?
Milan Kundera
It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Dantes,rejected by all the world,frequently experienced a desire for solitude, and what solitude is at the same time more complete,more poetical , than that of a bark floating isolated on the sea during the obscurity of the night, in the silence of immensity and under the eye of Heaven? Now this solitude was peopled with this thoughts, the night lighted by his illusions, and the silence animated by his anticipations.
Alexandre Dumas
We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.
Anaïs Nin
There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
Hippolyte Taine
Does a rake deserve to possess anything of worth, since he chases everything in skirts and then imagines he can successfully hide his shame by slandering [women in general]?
Christine de Pizan
Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?
Roland Barthes
The propagandist naturally cannot reveal the true intentions of the principal for whom he acts... That would be to submit the projects to public discussion, to the scrutiny of public opinion, and thus to prevent their success... Propaganda must serve instead as a veil for such projects, masking true intentions.
Jacques Ellul
In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'episteme' that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.
Michel Foucault
Quarrels would not last long if the fault was only on one side.
La Rochefoucauld
Did you see her again in France?" I asked him.”“No. When I got to France, she was already dead. She committed suicide ...”“Why?”“She often told me she was frightened of getting old...
Patrick Modiano
Sin became a luxury, a flower set in her hair, a diamond fastened on her brow.
Émile Zola