Quotes by French Authors - Page 50

Patience is the art of hoping.
Vauvenargues
To hope is to enjoy.
Jacques Delille
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
Jacques Derrida
He would never exhort the faithful to persevere if he were not ready to give them the power to do so.
Francis de Sales
But the conceited man did not hear him. Conceited people never hear anything but praise.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones.
Honoré de Balzac
When our vices leave us we flatter ourselves with the credit of having left them.
La Rochefoucauld
I am terrified of being bored.
Marie Antoinette
The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
Simone Weil
When I walk in the forest just before the meal, while reciting the scriptural phrase that I "meditate" for that day, spiritual joy comes over me as if by appointment.
Adalbert de Vogüé
He seemed to have established in his mind an affinity between the two great passions of his life – pale ale and revolution – and assuredly he could not taste the one without dreaming of the other.
Guy de Maupassant
One cannot weep for the entire world. It is beyond human strength. One must choose.
Jean Anouilh
No matter the age, a woman who is unloved is lost - unloved she might as well die.
Coco Chanel
But an action which wants to serve man ought to be careful not to forget him on the way, if it chooses to fulfill itself blindly, it will lose its meaning or will take on an unforeseen meaning; for the goal is not fixed once & for all; it is defined all along the road which leads up to it.
Simone de Beauvoir
I should point out, creating one's own style, as much as is required to illustrate one of the aspects, the golden seam of language, involves beginning again at once, in a different manner, adopting the guise of a pupil when one risked becoming pedantic - thus by a shrugging of one's shoulders, disconcerting some with their genuflecting stance, and immortalizing oneself in multiple, impersonal, or even anonymous forms in response to the gesture of arms raised in stupefaction.
Stéphane Mallarmé
Calumniate calumniate there will always be something which sticks.
Pierre Beaumarchais
The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)...
Roland Barthes
With heart at rest I climbed the citadel'sSteep height, and saw the city as from a tower,Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,Where evil comes up softly like a flower.Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;But like an old sad faithful lecher, fainTo drink delight of that enormous trullWhose hellish beauty makes me young again.Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapors full,Sodden with day, or, new appareled, standIn gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,I love thee, infamous city! Harlots andHunted have pleasures of their own to give,The vulgar herd can never understand.
Charles Baudelaire
He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I see nothing. I do not move. It is an empty time, animal time, vigilant, I am submerged, under the earth and under time. I listen. Perhaps the waiting is a form of prayer.
Hélène Cixous
While there are things about which one does not boast, there are others for which to be pitied would be all too humiliating.
Gaston Leroux
We want books that are written for those of us who doubt everything, who cry over the least little thing, who are startled by the slightest noise.
Laurence Cossé
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
Anaïs Nin
For the future, I shall rely only upon those elements of my character which I have tested. Who would ever have said that I should find pleasure in shedding tears? That I should love the man who proves to me that I am nothing more than a fool?
Stendhal
As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
Simone de Beauvoir
To wipe out abuse is not enough; you have to change people's whole outlook. The mill is no longer standing, but the wind's still there, blowing away.
Victor Hugo
Conscious living allows us to become the composers and conductors of our lives.
Serge Mazerand
(Love’s atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimately* it is possible to talk about love only *according to a strict allocutive determination*; whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistic, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is *for* someone.).
Roland Barthes
The principle is twofold, do not forget. The book, as a book, belongs to the author, but as a thought, it belongs – the word is not too extreme – to the human race. All intelligences, all minds, are eligible, all own it. If one of these two rights, the right of the writer and the right of the human mind, were to be sacrificed, it would certainly be the right of the writer, because the public interest is our only concern, and that must take precedence in anything that comes before us.
Victor Hugo
...when an old person dies, a whole library disappears.
Simone Schwarz-Bart
Hope is the Word which God has written on the brow of every man.
Victor Hugo
He [Bloch] was one of those touchy, highly-strung people who cannot bear to have made a blunder, will not admit it to themselves, and whose whole day is ruined by it.
Marcel Proust
In the savage horde the most vagabond, as well as in the most civilized nations of Europe, man is only what he is made to be by external circumstances; he is necessarily elevated by his equals; he contracts from them his habits and his wants; his ideas are no longer his own; he enjoys, from the enviable prerogative of his species, a capacity of developing his understanding bu the power of initiation, and the influence of society.
Jean Marc Gaspard Itard
Heureuse la mort qui oste le loisir aux apprests de tel equipage.
Michel de Montaigne
I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.
Montesquieu
At the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of Heaven fills those who are quitting the light of Earth.
Victor Hugo
Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
Jean-Luc Godard
I believe that being happy is the only important thing. Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or torturous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.
Joanne Harris
We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.
Blaise Pascal
Those things: Mystery, Fate, and Enchantment... they are things that young people offer us as soon as we get close to them. And if we’re not careful, we can be seduced by, and drawn back into, the youthful world the young preside over.
Roman Payne
I rushed to the living room to protect myself from I don't know what, behind my best friend, a book.
Marjane Satrapi
Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is thread, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.
Simone Signoret
In the midst of this utopia, which only your fellow lone voyagers would perceive, you used to transgress society’s rules unknowingly, and no one would hold you accountable for it. You would mistakenly enter private residences, go to concerts to which you had not been invited, eat at community banquets where you could only guess the community’s identity when they started giving speeches. Had you behaved like this in your own country, you would have been taken for a liar or a fool. But the improbable ways of a foreigner are accepted. Far from your home, you used to taste the pleasure of being mad without being alienated, of being an imbecile without renouncing your intelligence, of being an impostor without culpability.
Édouard Levé
I fell over twice. It was loud. The garden was black outside our circle of light. The endless night stretched all around us, so we told each other that we had to be close together, together in the dark.
Laure Eve
From all that I saw,and everywhere I wandered,I learned that time cannot be spent,It only can be squandered.
Roman Payne
Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more readiness for the very reason which, to our minds, ought to have made it more unbearable; namely, that such a seclusion was forced upon her by the gradual and steady diminution in her strength which she was able to measure daily, which, by making every action, every movement 'tiring' to her if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the blessed, strengthening and refreshing charm of repose.
Marcel Proust
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges to beg in the streets and to steal bread.
Anatole France
When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.
Marguerite Duras
Why are you drinking? demanded the little prince."So that I may forget," replied the tippler."Forget what?" inquired the little prince, who was already sorry for him."Forget that I am ashamed," the tippler confessed, hanging his head."Ashamed of what?" insisted the little prince, who wanted to help him."Ashamed of drinking!
Antoine De Saint Exupery
God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.
John Calvin
I am afraid I shall not find Him but I shall still look for Him. If He exists He may be appreciative of my efforts.
Jules Renard
I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
Françoise Sagan
For after all, why do we go on fighting? If we die for democracy then we must be one of the democracies. Let the rest fight with us, if that is the case. But the most powerful of them, the only one that could save us, chooses to bide its time. Very good. That is its right. But by so doing, that democracy signifies that we are fighting for ourselves alone. And we go on fighting despite the assurance that we have lost the war. Why, then, do we go on dying? Out of despair? But there is no despair. You know nothing about defeat if you think there is room in it for despair.There is a verity that is higher than the pronouncements of the intelligence. There is a thing which pierces and governs us and which cannot be grasped by the intelligence. A tree has no language. We are a tree. There are truths which are evident, though not to be put into words. I do not die in order to obstruct the path of the invasion, for there is no shelter upon which I can fall back with those I love. I do not die to preserve my honor, since I deny that my honor is at stake, and I challenge the jurisdiction of my judge. Nor do I die out of desperation.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
His remorse was purely physical. Only his body, strained nerves, and cowering flesh were afraid of the drowned man. Conscience played no part in his terrors, and he had not the slightest regret about killing Camille; in his moments of calm, when the spectre was not present, he would have committed the murder over again had he thought his interests required it.
Émile Zola
A leader is a dealer in hope.
Napoléon Bonaparte
she had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and non-love.
Milan Kundera
A work of art has an author and yet when it is perfect it has something which is anonymous about it.
Simone Weil
Les rêves sont seuls les réalités de la vie.
Xavier Forneret
Genius and science have burst the limits of space, and few observations, explained by just reasoning, have unveiled the mechanism of the universe. Would it not also be glorious for man to burst the limits of time, and, by a few observations, to ascertain the history of this world, and the series of events which preceded the birth of the human race?
Georges Cuvier