Quotes by French Authors - Page 51

I never was ruined but twice - once when I lost a lawsuit and once when I gained one.
Voltaire
The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny thatthe effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen themby repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalentof destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipationis imperative.
Hélène Cixous
I used to be a poet.My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.Now I am old...drunk on wine and candle fumes.Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air so as to entertain moths before they go off to die.I used to be a poet and my words were gold.
Roman Payne
the comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation
Marcel Proust
Give us being and feeling over having any day.
Mireille Guiliano
The work of an intellectual is not to form the political will of others; it is, through the analyses he does in his own domains, to bring assumptions and things taken for granted again into question, to shake habits, ways of acting and thinking, to dispel the familiarity of the accepted, to take the measure of rules and institutions and, starting from that re-problemitisation (where he plays his specific role as intellectual) to take part in the formation of a political will (where he has his role to play as citizen).
Michel Foucault
Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces.At meetings I was earnest, enthusiastic, and committed; among friends, unconstrained and given to teasing; with Marketa, cynical and fitfully witty; and alone (and thinking of Marketa), unsure of myself and as agitated as a schoolboy.Was the last face the real one?No. They were all real: I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn’t know who I was or wanted to be. (I was frightened by the differences between one face and the next; none of them seemed to fit me properly, and I groped my way clumsily among them.)
Milan Kundera
Very well, young man, very well," Treville went on, "I know those airs. I came to Paris with four ecus in my pocket, and I'd have fought with anybody who told me I was in no condition to buy the Louvre.
Alexandre Dumas
Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son’s foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn’t understand mumbled over the child, others go to heir church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.
Voltaire
But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.
Roland Barthes
You don't mean to say that Hogan has turned into a woman? Why, yes, that's him all right, you can recognize him by the fact that he has two legs, two arms, and an indecipherable face. Man, woman, what difference does it make? Are they not all exactly the same, these little black insects with their rhythmic movements, the same eyes, the same thoughts?
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
Albert Camus
At certain moments, words are nothing; it is thetone in which they are uttered.
Paul Bourget
He never treated her as a wife. He wooed her over and over again, with presents, flowers, new pleasures.
Anaïs Nin
Rather than recount his life as he has lived it, he must live his life as he will recount it.
André Gide
He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.
Victor Hugo
No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.
Jacques Ellul
Tolerance is a tremendous virtue but the immediate neighbours of tolerance are apathy and weakness.
Sir James Goldsmith
Those who do not weep, do not see.
Victor Hugo
Where would you be without etymology'? Lea asked sarcastically.'I think I might find words a little less interesting,' said Mr Ruche.
Denis Guedj
Accursed! Accursed! You shall be accursed to the thirteenth generation!
Maurice Druon
The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them.
Marcel Proust
To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.
Gilles Deleuze
People do not just buy products. They buy better versions of themselves. And the packages in which they want the products to be delivered must come from humble and approachable brands. People have no patience for fluff.
Cendrine Marrouat
A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.
Jules Renard
You were said to have died of suffering. But you died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void.
Édouard Levé
for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
Milan Kundera
Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
Albert Camus
Men are so isolated, prisoners of their own wretched selves, that they can be unbelievably sociable.
Jacques Yonnet
People where you live," the little prince said, "grow five thousand roses in one garden... yet they don't find what they're looking for...They don't find it," I answered.And yet what they're looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water..."Of course," I answered.And the little prince added, "But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
When you begin a new story, your job is to envision, to try to glimpse stuff that doesn't as yet exist. That's what writing is, going out to meet the ghosts of the future. Not out of the past, not the ones that are dead and buried. Ghosts of the future, those who don't exist yet.
Cédric Klapisch
I don't know if you have any idea what a high school in Paris is like in this day and age in the posh neighborhoods—but quite honestly, the slummy banlieues of Marseille have nothing on ours. In fact it may even be worse here, because where you have money, you have drugs—and not just a little bit and not just one kind.
Muriel Barbery
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.
Anaïs Nin
True love is like ghosts which many believe in, but few have seen.
François de La Rochefoucauld
A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.
Roman Payne
What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.
André Gide
The child watched its disappearance--he was astounded but dreamy. His stupefaction was complicated by a sense of the dark reality of existence. It seemed as if there were experience in this dawning being. Did he, perchance, already exercise judgment? Experience coming too early constructs, sometimes, in the obscure depths of a child's mind, some dangerous balance--we know not what--in which the poor little soul weighs God.Feeling himself innocent, he yielded. There was no complaint-THE IRREPROACHABLE DOES NOT REPROACH.(The Man Who Laughs)
Victor Hugo
The future is hidden even from those who make it.
Anatole France
For a few moments, raising his arms desperately, the Reverend Mouret implored Heaven. His shoulder-blades cracked, with such fantastic force did he pray. But soon enough his arms fell to his sides, his hopes abashed. From heaven came one of those silences utterly void of hope known to the devout.
Émile Zola
It's impossible, that's for sure. So let's start working.
Philippe Petit
The senator...was a smart man who had made his way in life with a single-mindedness oblivious to any of those stumbling blocks known as conscience, sworn oaths, justice, duty...
Victor Hugo
Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.
Robert Bresson
If they're from the village, you take them to the inn. If they're from the city, you treat them with respect when they are beautiful and throw them on the highway when they are dead.
Voltaire
The meditative mind sees disagreeable or agreeable things with equanimity, patience, and good-will. Transcendent knowledge is seeing reality in utter simplicity. (146)
Jean-Yves Leloup
To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.
Emil M. Cioran
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anaïs Nin
Speed is simply the rite that initiates us intoemptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very intensification of their mobility. Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts geometry.
Jean Baudrillard
I am made only for passion; it is the temperature of love that I cannot endure. I am afraid, and I think it is death- everything but passion seems like death to me. Only in fever do I feel life.
Anaïs Nin
Élodie, who was rising fifteen, lifted her anaemic, puffy, virginal face with its wispy hair; she was so thin-blooded that good country air seemed only to make her more sickly.
Émile Zola
One dead body required two men either to bury it or to transport it to the rear. A wounded soldier, on the other hand, immobilized five men for an indeterminate amount of time; and who knew whether it was even worth the effort.
Stéphane Audeguy
One should never expect anyone to reply to one's questions.
Patrick Modiano
Montesquieu had the style of a genius Buffon the genius of style.
Baron Grimm
Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against minor perversions were multiplied; sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old age, a norm of sexual development was defined and all the possible deviations were carefully described; pedagogical controls and medical treatments were organized; around the least fantasies, moralists, but especially doctors, brandished the whole emphatic vocabulary of abomination.
Michel Foucault
As a teenager, I didn’t want to be me; I wanted to be many different people. Maybe I realized that they all lived inside me and that if I managed to connect with them, they would become aspects of me.
Marion Cotillard
Art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
The discrepancy between the modern observance and the prescriptions of the Rule had struck me ever since the novitiate, and no satisfactory explanation had ever been given to me. People said that man had changed: the weakness of people's health no longer allows us to fast. Was it true?
Adalbert de Vogüé
...and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.
Gustave Flaubert
The fundamental principle of morality which we seek as a necessity for thought is not, however, a matter only of arranging and deepening current views of good and evil, but also of expanding and extending these. A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help all life which he is able to succour, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself, nor how far it is capable of feeling. To him life as such is sacred. He shatters no ice crystal that sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from its tree, breaks off no flower, and is careful not to crush any insect as he walks. If he works by lamplight on a summer evening, he prefers to keep the window shut and to breathe stifling air, rather than to see insect after insect fall on his table with singed and sinking wings.
Albert Schweitzer
This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity, and if he writes what occurs to him he succeeds better than if he copies, with the help of a magnifying glass, objects placed outside of him.
Théophile Gautier