Quotes by French Authors - Page 54

The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
Albert Camus
Love is the opposite of good sense.
Marjane Satrapi
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
Albert Camus
But my faith seems naive, at least today. Maybe tomorrow I can believe again.
Anaïs Nin
What criterion ought one to adopt to judge one's fellows? After all, there was not a single person he knew who might not, in certain circumstances, prove capable of a shameful action.
Marcel Proust
But one gets tired of everything, even of abusing a person. Paris abandons its puppets which it raises to the throne as quickly as it does its martyrs whom it hoists on the gibbet; in its perpetual hunger for new playthings, it never gets itself excited overly much before the statues of its heroes or at the sight of the blood of its victims.
Octave Mirbeau
Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.
Voltaire
And you, you’re an angel,’ he said, scornfully, ‘but an angel from a hot place. Since I’m the devil, that makes you one of my subjects. I think I’ll brand you.
Françoise Gilot
For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue — that I had to do the job myself.
Anaïs Nin
I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness
Frantz Fanon
Instinct teaches us to look for happiness outside ourselves.
Blaise Pascal
If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.
Albert Camus
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Émile Zola
Between ourselves, there are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.
Michel de Montaigne
Let us imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men.
Pascal
Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
Anaïs Nin
This land on which so many centuries have left their mark is merely an obligatory retreat for you, whereas it has always been our dearest hope. Your too sudden passion is made up of spite and necessity.
Albert Camus
Consider in his spiritual martyr this being who lies with closed eyes, dislocated like the victim of a brutal accident who no longer requires care or rescue. Count the stabbing wounds of the hideous disappointment in the human imagination. Auscultate this pensive desert where alternate the rale and the silence. Feel pity for the grief that calls not only for death, but for a disgracied death, and receive, o World, this weight of trampled dream in the paradise with no conscience of your vain eternity !
Anna de Noailles
Creation is always an act of affirmation, a lust for life or activity, a restlessness accompanied by art. That art is what pleases and invigorates and mystifies me.
Jean Moreau
Property is theft.
Proudhon
There were some things it was better not to know. They caused "metaphysical" anguish, for which there was as yet no remedy. When it was worried, the Tribe was inhibited and unable to act.It was very bad for everyone. The Tribe started to produce toxins that poisoned it. Its long-term survival was more important than short-term knowledge of the truth. If an eye had seen something that the brain knew was dangerous for the rest of the organism, it was better for the brain to put out that eye.
Bernard Werber
I speak the truth not so much as I would but as much as I dare and I dare a little more as I grow older.
Michel de Montaigne
All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.
François Fénelon
It may well have been, too, that the smiling moderation with which she faced and answered these blasphemies, that this tender and hypocritical rebuke appeared to her frank and generous nature as a particularly shameful and seductive form of that criminal attitude towards life which she was endeavouring to adopt. But she could not resist the attraction of being treated with affection by a woman who had just shewn herself so implacable towards the defenceless dead; she sprang on to the knees of her friend and held out a chaste brow to be kissed;...
Marcel Proust
Because it was natural, could he not see that it was marvelous? Poor creature!
André Gide
I’ll be as loving as you will be, as stubborn as I know you are, as passionate as I’m thankful you are and as supportive and understanding as I’ve known you to be. You are my best friend and I love you
Danielle-Claude Ngontang Mba
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
Michel Foucault
The secret seemed to me much more mysterious than that; it was the secret, I thought, of one who had known death; for I moved a stranger among ordinary people, like a man who has risen from the grave, and at first I merely felt rather painfully out of my element; but soon I became aware of a very different feeling.Was it pride now? Perhaps; but at any rate there was no trace of vanity mixed with it. It was rather, for the first time, the consciousness of my own worth. What separated me - distinguished me - from other people was crucial; what no one said, what no one could say but myself, that was my task to say.
André Gide
... the idea that 'Life' contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.
Marcel Proust
Le passé et le présent sont deux statues incomplètes: l'une a été retirée toute mutilée du débris des âges, l'autre n'a pas encore reçu sa perfection de l'avenir.
Francois Rene De Chateaubriand
The dead know everything, but don't give a damn.
Joanne Harris
Belief in immortality is harmful because it is not in our power to conceive of the soul as really incorporeal. So this belief is in fact a belief in the prolongation of life, and it robs death of its purpose.
Simone Weil
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
Victor Hugo
I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.
Anaïs Nin
The absurd man is he who never changes.
Auguste Barthelemy
I remember a time when a cabbage could sell itself by being a cabbage. Nowadays it’s no good being a cabbage – unless you have an agent and pay him a commission. Nothing is free anymore to sell itself or give itself away. These days, Countess, every cabbage has its pimp.
Jean Giraudoux
I listen with attention to the judgment of all men;but so far as I can remember,I have followed none but my own.
Michel de Montaigne
The very principle of democracy is founded on the possibility of making alternative choices. There is no longer a need for democracy, since ideology made the idea that "there is no alternative" acceptable. Adherence to a meta-social principle of superior rationality allows for the elimination of the necessity and possibility of choosing. The so-called principle of the rationality of "markets" exactly fills this function in the ideology of obsolescent capitalism. Democratic practice is thus emptied of all content in the way is open to what I have called "low-intensity democracy" - that is, to electoral buffooneries where parades of majorettes take the place of programs, to the society of the spectacle. Delegitimized by these practices, politics is undone, begins to drift and loses its potential power to give meaning and coherence to alternative societal projects.
Samir Amin
I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live - contented themselves with appearing to live, and were on the verge of considering life merely as a vexatious hindrance to writing.
André Gide
Warfare is now an interlocking system of actions—political, economic,psychological, military—that aims at the overthrow of the establishedauthority in a country and its replacement by another regime.
Roger Trinquier
[…] Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.
Albert Camus
He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.Nothing is more sublime.
Victor Hugo
Liberality consists less in giving much than in giving at the right moment.
Jean de La Bruyère
It's not enough merely to exist. Every man has to seek in his own way to make his own self more noble and to relize his own true worth.
Albert Schweitzer
Unfortunately in this world of ours, each person views things through a certain medium, which prevents his seeing them in the same light as others…
Alexandre Dumas
He who doesn't accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
Charles Baudelaire
Against an economism void of values other than those of exchange, protest stood for reuniting the festival and daily life, for transforming daily life into a site of desire and pleasure. The protesters were protesting against the fact, simultaneously obvious and ignored, that delight and joy, pleasure and desire, desert a society that is content with satisfaction—that is to say, catalogued, created needs that procure some particular object and evaporate in it.
Henri Lefebvre
My mother, writing from France, admonished me to take care of my health as she had during the war. My head could be all set for the guillotine, and still my mother would scold me for forgetting my muffler. She never missed an opportunity to try and convince me that the world is a kindly place and that she'd done a good job in conceiving me. This alleged Providence was the great subterfuge of maternal thoughtlessness.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.
Roland Barthes
... it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.
Marcel Proust
For with dandies, a joke is the only way of making yourself respected.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
Stendhal
Love truth, but pardon error.
Voltaire
The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much greater business of plunder.
Frantz Fanon
If you want people to think well of you do not speak well of yourself.
Blaise Pascal
Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate--for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.
Albert Camus
The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.
Georges Bataille
Your silence exists as does my self gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world's dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other, without taking breath away from them.
Luce Irigaray
Let's say I have a mystical soul and a rational brain, and, like Montaigne, I am incapable of choosing between them. I don't know if I believe in God, but I am often tempted to believe.
François Mitterrand
The emancipation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class itself — without the assistance of governments.
pierre-jospeh proudhon