Quotes by French Authors - Page 46

Time spent with cats is never wasted.
Colette
The heart has its own reasons that reason can't understand.
Voltaire
We see that that ritual of reading every evening at the end of the bed when they were so little--set time, set gestures-- was like a prayer.
Daniel Pennac
The smile is civilization’s finest adornment. It signifies the willpower and duty to fashion mankind’s coexistence as quietly and agreeably as possible so that it will always appear friendly. For it is all a matter of appearance. The smile is culture’s diploma: it is the diplomat’s badge.
Iwan Goll
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
Rémy de Gourmont
A lifetime spent in the study of the history of societies since the dawn of mankind presumably inclined him to skepticism and misgivings in regard to any great scheme, religious or political, that set out to create universal happiness in one fell swoop; what it was more likely to create, in his opinion, was universal misery; and his faith in heaven-sent saviors was hardly greater.
François Maspero
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
Charles Baudelaire
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.
Jean-Paul Sartre
For, like desire, regret seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied. When one begins to love, one spends one’s time, not in getting to know what one’s love really is, but in making it possible to meet next day. When one abandons love one seeks not to know one’s grief but to offer to her who is causing it that expression of it which seems to one the most moving. One says the things which one feels the need of saying, and which the other will not understand, one speaks for oneself alone. I wrote: 'I had thought that it would not be possible. Alas, I see now that it is not so difficult.' I said also: 'I shall probably not see you again;' I said it while I continued to avoid shewing a coldness which she might think affected, and the words, as I wrote them, made me weep because I felt that they expressed not what I should have liked to believe but what was probably going to happen.
Marcel Proust
That's precisely what's so extraordinary about you, you enjoy giving pleasure. Offering your body as an object of pleasure, giving pleasure unselfishly: that's what Westerners don't know how to do any more. They've completely lost the sense of giving. Try as they might, they no longer feel sex as something natural. Not only are they ashamed of their own bodies, which aren't up to porn standards, but for the same reasons they no longer feel truly attracted to the body of the other. It's impossible to make love without a certain abandon, without accepting, at least temporarily, the state of being in a state of dependency, of weakness. Sentimental adulation and sexual obsession have the same roots, both proceed from some degree of selflessness; it's not a domain in which you can find fulfilment without losing yourself. We have become cold, rational, acutely conscious of our individual existence and our rights; more than anything, we want to avoid alienation and dependence; on top of that we're obsessed with health and hygiene: these are hardly ideal conditions in which to make love.
Michel Houellebecq
...since I realized that he (Picasso) lived in a self-enclosed world and that his solitude was therefore total, I wanted to explore my own solitude.
Françoise Gilot
...infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyse mechanisms of which otherwise we should know nothing. A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to the study of the phenomena of memory.
Marcel Proust
What we call love is the desire to awaken and to keep awake in another's body heart and mind the responsibility of flattering in our place the self of which we are not very certain.
Paul Geraldy
There is no such thing as a special category of science called applied science; there is science and its applications, which are related to one another as the fruit is related to the tree that has borne it.
Louis Pasteur
The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.
Gustave Flaubert
Alexander Caesar Charlemagne and I myself have founded empires but upon what do these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon love and to this very day millions would die for Him.
Napoleon
For J.-L.G., color does not exist simply to show us that a girl has blue eyes or that a certain gentleman is a member of the Legion of Honor. By necessity, a film by Godard that offers the possibility of color is going to show us something that could not be shown in black and white, a kind of voice that cannot resound ehen colors are mute.
Aragon
In every action we must look beyond the action at our past, present and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all these things.
Blaise Pascal
Eloquence is painted thought, and thus those who, after having painted it, add somewhat more, make a picture, not a portrait.
Blaise Pascal
Nicole had put on weight. This is the effect which, in three cases out of four, unhappiness has upon women. The process of eating guarantees at least the health of the body.
Françoise Sagan
Usually, the murmur that rises up from Paris by day is the city talking; in the night it is the city breathing; but here it is the city singing. Listen, then, to this chorus of bell-towers - diffuse over the whole the murmur of half a million people - the eternal lament of the river - the endless sighing of the wind - the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed upon the hills, in the distance, like immense organpipes - extinguish to a half light all in the central chime that would otherwise be too harsh or too shrill; and then say whetehr you know of anything in the world more rich, more joyous, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes - this furnace of music - these thousands of brazen voices, all singing together in flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than this city which is but one orchestra - this symphony which roars like a tempest.
Victor Hugo
Wherever there is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me.
Anaïs Nin
Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.
Charles Baudelaire
It is the aim of good government to stimulate production of bad government to encourage consumption.
Jean Baptiste Say
Here we are in the century of information, that is to say the unformed. Every kind of literature will be journalistic, with a science for ballast.
Julien Torma
We're becoming slaves; the war scatters us in all directions, takes away everything we own, snatches the bread from out of our mouths; let me at least retain the right to decide my own destiny, to laugh at it, defy it, escape it if I can. A slave? Better to be a slave than a dog who thinks he's free as he trots along behind his master. She listened to the sound of men and horses passing by. They don't even realise they're slaves, she said to herself, and I, I would be just like them if a sense of pity, solidarity, the "spirit of the hive" forced me to refuse to be happy.
Irène Némirovsky
Better to suffer than to die.
Jean de La Fontaine
One understands now the drama that rends the adolescent girl at puberty: she cannot become “a grown-up” without accepting her femininity
Simone de Beauvoir
When you go in search of honey, you must expect to be stung by bees.
Joseph Joubert
Why do people respect the package rather than the man?
Michel de Montaigne
Better beware of the newly deadOf the white-handed ghostAnd the brightness of these lamps . . .
Luc Berimont
he doesn't play the game ... He refuses to lie. Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But Meursault, contrary to appearances, doesn't want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened.
Albert Camus
The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The entire stock of relationships which suited in war—militiae—was regarded as inadmissible and improper in peace—domi. We have the measure of how right the Romans were in this respect in the experience of the intellectual and moral impoverishment brought about by total mobilisation.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one
Voltaire
Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.
Paul Valéry
I am happy and content because I think I am.
Alain-René Le Sage
Here comes Mamma Vauquerr, fair as a starrr; and strung up like a bunch of carrots. Aren't we suffocating ourselves a wee bit?' he asked, placing a hand on the top of her corset. 'A bit of a crush in the vestibule, here, Mamma! If we start crying, there'll be an explosion. Never mind, I'll be there to collect the bits--just like an antiquary.''Now, there's the language of true French gallantry,' murmured Madame Vauquer in an aside to Madame Couture.
Honoré de Balzac
The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.
Michel de Montaigne
Novel is a particular form of narrative./ And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time we begin to understand language until our death, we are perpetually surrounded by narratives, first of all in our family, then at school, then through our encounters with people and reading. - The Novel as Research. (1968)
Michel Butor
Though men pride themselves on their great actions often they are not the result of any great design but of chance.
François de La Rochefoucauld
A woman is more influenced by what she divines than by what she is told.
Ninon de l'Enclos
I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.
Blaise Pascal
Our life is like some vast lake that is slowly filling with the stream of our years. As the waters creep surely upward the landmarks of the past are one by one submerged. But there shall always be memory to lift its head above the tide until the lake is overflowing.
Alexandre Charles Auguste Bisson
And then I recalled those mysterious stories about the waxworkers of the middle ages and the public reprobation attached to their trade. Did they not live in cellars, in the eternal twilight propitious for enchantments and apparitions? Their visionary art (who, more than they, evoked a truer image of life?) was closely related to that of magicians: bewitchments were carried out with wax figures, witch trials are full of them, and one particular legend haunted me above all, that of the modeler from Anspach, who slowly squeezed the soul and the life out of his model in order to animate his painted waxwork and then, having finished his work of art, awaited nightfall to go and bury the corpse in the ditch at the city walls.
Jean Lorrain
The gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue, but of life. It cannot be grasped by reason and memory only, but it is fully understood when it possesses the whole soul and penetrates to the inner recesses of the heart.
John Calvin
If triangles had a god, he would have three sides.
Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
My wife with the hair of a wood fireWith the thoughts of heat lightningWith the waist of an hourglassWith the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tigerMy wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitudeWith the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earthWith the tongue of rubbed amber and glassMy wife with the tongue of a stabbed hostWith the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyesWith the tongue of an unbelievable stoneMy wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writingWith brows of the edge of a swallow's nestMy wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roofAnd of steam on the panesMy wife with shoulders of champagneAnd of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the iceMy wife with wrists of matchesMy wife with fingers of luck and ace of heartsWith fingers of mown hayMy wife with armpits of marten and of beechnutAnd of Midsummer NightOf privet and of an angelfish nestWith arms of seafoam and of riverlocksAnd of a mingling of the wheat and the millMy wife with legs of flaresWith the movements of clockwork and despairMy wife with calves of eldertree pithMy wife with feet of initialsWith feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinkingMy wife with a neck of unpearled barleyMy wife with a throat of the valley of goldOf a tryst in the very bed of the torrentWith breasts of nightMy wife with breasts of a marine molehillMy wife with breasts of the ruby's crucibleWith breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dewMy wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of daysWith the belly of a gigantic clawMy wife with the back of a bird fleeing verticallyWith a back of quicksilverWith a back of lightWith a nape of rolled stone and wet chalkAnd of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinkingMy wife with hips of a skiffWith hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathersAnd of shafts of white peacock plumesOf an insensible pendulumMy wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestosMy wife with buttocks of swans' backsMy wife with buttocks of springWith the sex of an irisMy wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypusMy wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeatMy wife with a sex of mirrorMy wife with eyes full of tearsWith eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needleMy wife with savanna eyesMy wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prisonMy wife with eyes of wood always under the axeMy wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire
André Breton
You are like a god, like an immortal one,' she whispered to me one night in our bed, her naked body pressed to mine, our sweat golden and glistening in the candlelight. 'Oh, my love,' I whispered back to her, 'I am more mortal than all. It seems that a part of me dies every night that I lie with you.
Roman Payne
I've got to follow them - I am their leader.
Alexandre Ledru-Rollin
History is the most patient of teachers. If Man doesn't get the lesson, it keeps repeating itself until he finally gets it.
Christian Adam Ribeiraud
Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commence from that point on.
Georges Bataille
I have loved to the point of madness that which is called madness that which to me is the only sensible way to love.
Françoise Sagan
Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son has happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation – "It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?"Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade – that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs – I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen."It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.
Frédéric Bastiat
Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.
Marcel Duchamp
. . . for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.
Frédéric Bastiat
She [Mme Sazerat] did not offer her hand, but smiled at my mother with vague melancholy as one smiles at a playmate from one's childhood, but with whom all connection has been severed because she has lived a debauched life, married a jailbird or, worse still, a divorced man.
Marcel Proust
I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement it takes place every day.
Albert Camus
Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world.
Pierre Janet
How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between.
Anaïs Nin