Quotes by French Authors - Page 55

Those who live are those who fight.
Victor Hugo
Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images, the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire: that is MUHAMMAD. As regards all the standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask IS THERE ANY MAN GREATER THAN HE?
Alphonse de Lamartine
Nothing is more difficult and therefore more precious than to be able to decide.
Napoléon Bonaparte
I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.
Michel de Montaigne
An attentive reader will always learn more, and more quickly, from good authors than from life.
Hervé Le Tellier
Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft.
Roman Payne
Long only for what you have.
André Gide
To commit the act of felo-de-se is a form of delusion. You see, my love, to leave one's life unfinished implies the possibility of success. What is left unlived may contain the potential truth one always seeks. Those who kill themselves do so with the conviction that they would have reached that truth eventually had they lived to the proper end. They die in the illusion of hope which in a way keeps the rest of us alive. Reason, therefore, for not committing suicide.
Raymond Federman
My downfall raises me to infinite heights.
Napoléon Bonaparte
With the beginning of life, comes the thirst for truth, whereas the ability to lie is gradually acquired in the process of trying to stay alive.
Gao Xingjian
We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is linked to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.
Emil M. Cioran
He understood then that neither time nor distance had lessened his love for her.But was love that made him ache with suffering truly worth fighting for?
Guillaume Musso
...chance is sometimes a wonderful accomplice in crime.
Émile Gaboriau
Time is an avid gambler who has no need to cheat to win every time.
Charles Baudelaire
I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.
Jacques Lacan
Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.
Anaïs Nin
One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.
Frantz Fanon
We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.
La Rochefoucauld
He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
Joseph Joubert
He was terrified by the sublime horror of it, for intensity of feeling, carried to this degree, is sublime. ("A Woman's Vengeance")
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
I've been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you’re a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you’re a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie.
Jean Rouch
Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are myrevolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity ofconsciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitationto death—and I refuse suicide.
Albert Camus
Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest.
Jean Douchet
Vengeance is a delicious fruit, which must be allowed to ripen in order that it may be fully enjoyed.
Émile Gaboriau
Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.
Hélène Cixous
Perhaps the most important thing I came to understand during my decade at HoJo's was that Americans had extremely open palates compared to French diners. They were willing to try items that lay outside their normal range of tastes. If they liked the food, that was all that mattered. I wasn't constantly battling ingrained prejudices as I would have been in France, where doing something as simple as adding carrots to boeuf bourguignon could have gotten me guillotined, not because carrots make the dish taste bad (they are great), but because it wouldn't be the way a boeuf was supposed to be made. In France, unless a dish was prepared exactly "right," people would know and complain. In the States, if it tasted good, then fine, the customer was happy. A whole new world of culinary possibilities had opened up before me.
Jacques Pépin
A man does not have to be an angel to be a saint.
Albert Schweitzer
He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.
Michel Houellebecq
The festivity had reached that apogee of joy when you face the happy fate of being crushed to death.
Émile Zola
The cats sleep for days at a time and make love from the first star until dawn. Their pleasures are fierce, and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.
Albert Camus
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
Georges Bataille
3 o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
Jean-Paul Sartre
L’arbre tombe feuille à feuille : si les hommes contemplaient chaque matin ce qu’ils ont perdu la veille, ils s’apercevraient bien de leur pauvreté.
Francois Rene De Chateaubriand
I felt condemned to obscurity and to celibacy. But when one is driven by passion, one can live on almost nothing, and I was driven by passion for writing. One does not starve in modern, Western societies, and one can do without such amenities as the telephone, a car, entertainment.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
If the nose of Cleopatra had been a little shorter the whole face of the world would have been changed.
Pascal
When you're in my arms, I know you're mine. But your feet are so swift, so swift, they carry you as lightly as wings, I never know where, too fast, too fast away from me.
Anaïs Nin
...Opal is dead, and I don't see how a healer can change that! It's not something to joke about."Joke?" Then Owen hit his forehead and cried, "That's right, you haven't heard!"Heard what?" asked Adrien, who felt an insane glimmer of hope return to his heart.Death is on strike! She hasn't done that for two centuries, and it's very annoying. Your friend is alive."Very annoying?" repeated Amber. "I don't see what's so annoying about a miracle! What is Death on strike for?"Everyone knows that Death lives in Fairytale-in an inaccessible area, obviously. And just a few hours ago, she decided to stop working. So, for now, no one can die.
Flavia Bujor
To make a crooked stick straight we bend it the contrary way.
Michel Montaigne
Clusters of distant lights was the view of Mankind that he liked the best. The lights had the archaic charm of little fires on a plain, and the frailty about them, if it did not excuse anything, at least explained a lot of Man's stubborn ruthlessness. Mankind had not started the mess that was life, after all. And on the whole, it had been an interesting species to be a part of, the girls especially, as long as you remembered to watch your back.
Jean-Christophe Valtat
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.
Milan Kundera
There is in all of us a strong disposition to regard what is lawful as legitimate, so much so that many falsely derive all justice from law. It is sufficient, then, for the law to order and sanction plunder, that it may appear to many consciences just and sacred. Slavery, protection, and monopoly find defenders, not only in those who profit by them, but in those who suffer by them. If you suggest a doubt as to the morality of these institutions, it is said directly—“You are a dangerous experimenter, a utopian, a theorist, a despiser of the laws; you would shake the basis upon which society rests.
Frédéric Bastiat
He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves - in Man... For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The old repeat themselves and the young have nothing to say. The boredom is mutual.
Jacques Bainville
Lend your ear then to this tutti of steeples; diffuse over the whole the buzz of half a million of human beings, the eternal murmur of the river, the infinite piping of the wind, the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed like immense organs on the four hills of the horizon; soften down, as with a demi-tint, all that is too shrill and too harsh in the central mass of sound, and say if you know any thing in the world more rich, more gladdening, more dazzling than that tumult of bells; than that furnace of music; than those ten thousand brazen tones breathed all at once from flutes of stone three hundred feet high; than that city which is but one orchestra; than that symphony rushing and roaring like a tempest.
Victor Hugo
Before you can ask 'Is Darwinian theory correct or not?', You have to ask the preliminary question 'Is it clear enough so that it could be correct?'. That's a very different question. One of my prevailing doctrines about Darwinian theory is 'Man, that thing is just a mess. It's like looking into a room full of smoke.' Nothing in the theory is precisely, clearly, carefully defined or delineated. It lacks all of the rigor one expects from mathematical physics, and mathematical physics lacks all the rigor one expects from mathematics. So we're talking about a gradual descent down the level of intelligibility until we reach evolutionary biology.
David Berlinski
My dear,In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.I realized, through it all, that…In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.Truly yours,Albert Camus”I like this because only one part is usually quoted but the full quote has such symmetry.
Albert Camus
Success produces success just as money produces money.
Nicolas de Chamfort
True miracles are created by men when they use the courage and intelligence that God gave them.
Jean Anouilh
Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting.
Gustave Flaubert
There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.
Albert Camus
It was then I realized that no one can escape his age, and that my dangerous contempt had melted like ice the moment someone was kind enough to show they cared about me, and in a way that suited me.
Raymond Radiguet
The best is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.
Roland Barthes
I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.
Milan Kundera
I asked him what his work was. He answered that he devoted all his time to his political activities... He was undoubtedly busy with the diplomatic relations between his testicles and women's breast.
Marjane Satrapi
Science is for those who learn poetry for those who know.
Joseph Roux
Brod was a brilliant intellectual with exceptional energy; a generous man willing to do battle for others; his attachment to Kafka was warm and disinterested. The only problem was his artistic orientation: a man of ideas, he knew nothing of the passion for form; his novels (he wrote twenty of them) are sadly conventional; and above all: he understood nothing at all about modern art.Why, despite all this, was Kafka so fond of him? What about you-do you stop being fond of your best friend because he has a compulsion to write bad verse?
Milan Kundera
Nevertheless man has found love, which is not a bad reply to that sly Deity, and he has adorned it with so much poetry that woman often forgets the sensual part of it. Those among us who are unable to deceive themselves have invented vice and refined debauchery, which is another way of laughing at God and paying homage, immodest homage, to beauty.
Guy de Maupassant
One night I summoned God, if He really existed, to show Himself to me. He didn't, and I never addressed another word to Him. In my heart of hearts I was very glad He didn't exist. I should have hated it if what was going on here below had had to end up in eternity.
Simone de Beauvoir