Quotes by French Authors - Page 57

Coffee, my delight of the morning; yoga, my delight of the noon. Then before nightfall, I run along the pleasant paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg. For when air cycles through the lungs, and the body is busy at noble tasks, creativity flows like water in a stream: the artist creates, the writer writes.
Roman Payne
Worry is the cross which we make for ourselves by overanxiety.
Francois de Fenelon
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
Colette
What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.
Anaïs Nin
I know positively - yes Rieux I can say I know the world inside out as no one on earth is free from it. And I know too that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in careless moment we breathe in somebody's face and fasten the infection on him. What's natural is the microbe. All the rest- health integrity purity if you like - is a product of the human will of vigilance that must never falter. The good man the man who infects hardly anyone is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power a never ending tension of the mind to avoid such lapses. Yes Rieux it's a wearying business being plague-stricken. But it's still more wearying to refuse to be it. That's why everybody in the world today looks so tired everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us who want to get the plague out of their systems feel such desperate weariness a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death.
Albert Camus
As long as you know most men are like children, you know everything.
Coco Chanel
The kingdom of God is peace in the Holy Spirit; He will reign in you if your heart is at peace. So, be at peace, Mademoiselle, and you will honor in a sovereign way the God of peace and love.
St. Vincent de Paul
I love you, June, and you know how acutely, how desperately. You know that no one can say or do anything to shake my love. I have taken you into myself, whole. You need have no fear of being unmasked, only loved.
Anaïs Nin
I have never been loved enough to gain the desire of reproducing a being in the image of my lover and I have never been given enough pleasure so that my brain has not had the leisure to seek better...I have wanted the impossible...
Rachilde
To love one that is great is almost to be great one's self.
Madame Necker
We have a tendency to obscure the forest of simple joys with the trees of problems.
Christiane Collange
To make a man a saint, it must indeed be by grace; and whoever doubts this does not know what a saint is, or a man.
Blaise Pascal
Every one has a sum of physical and moral suffering to pay, and whoever does not settle it here below, defrays it after death; happiness is only lent, and must be repaid; its very phantoms are like duties paid in advance on a future succession of sorrows.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
If we could but paint with the hand as we see with the eye!
Honoré de Balzac
Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.
Milan Kundera
All night the angelic made me gasp for breadth and dream of drowning in sand or earth or mud. I got up, my chest still racked, but glad to be finished with the phantasms which magnify a reality difficult enough in itself. Coffee so bitter it was undrinkable. A big roar. Two big roars. No relief. The mornings only consolation was of a faecal nature. Unexpectedly and impeccably i produced a magnificent turd, so long it had to curve at the ends to fit into the bowl. I contemplated fondly the fine chubby little babe of living clay i'd just brought forth, and my zest for life returned.
Michel Tournier
Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.
Anatole France
Le spectacle est le mauvais rêve de la société moderne enchaînée, qui n'exprime finalement que son désir de dormir. Le spectacle est le gardien de ce sommeil.
Guy Debord
It wasn't night, it was simply darkness, with me in the middle hoping all the while that time was carrying on flowing, that something would crop up, me all alone in the middle, with my veins and my muscles dissolving rapidly into nothingness, me made of molecules of flesh and thought, dispersing in a cloud (a process of expansion as sudden as that of the room, a nebula of bedroom and me, between limits that grew dimmer by the moment).
Marie Darrieussecq
Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.
Stéphane Mallarmé
The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power. In the seventeenth century, and even in the early eighteenth century, it was not, therefore, with all its theatre of terror, a lingering hang-over from an earlier age. Its ruthlessness, its spectacle, its physical violence, its unbalanced play of forces, its meticulous ceremonial, its entire apparatus were inscribed in the political functioning of the penal system.
Michel Foucault
We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
Julio Cortázar
The struggle to the top is in itself enough to fulfill the human heart. Sisyphus should be regarded as happy.
Albert Camus
Moderation is an ostentatious proof of our strength of character.
La Rochefoucauld
The women laughed and wept; the crowd stamped their feet enthusiastically, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. He was handsome — this orphan, this foundling, this outcast.
Victor Hugo
We need god to prosper those without him will not.
Nostradamus
No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Irony alone is damning.The flesh will be bland and you will believe you are forever reading the same book.
Anne Garréta
Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.
Édouard Levé
I have fallen into an abyss. I live in a world so curious, so strange. Of the dream that was my life, this is my nightmare.
Camille Claudel
My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.
Robert Bresson
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
Francois Rene De Chateaubriand
The stranger was still smiling. He transformed himself into a rose bush and entwined me. My Christian education meant that ever since childhood I have had a horror of vice and it was not without a quite understandable terror that I discerned the pleasure I felt in the embrace of this vigorous bush whose branches gradually mingled with my limbs, my hair and my looks. When one of its flowers came apart in my mouth, I could feel myself grasping the sorcerer in my arms in my turn. He was transformed into a torrent, and I was a barge, into desert and I was smoke, into a car and I was a road, into a man and I was a woman. 'What we are doing is very wrong,' he said and was off.
Robert Desnos
Her body accepted my brutal seed and took it to swell within, just as the patient earth accepts a falling fruit into its tender soil to cradle and nourish it to grow. Came a time, just springtime last, our infant child pushed through the fragile barrier of her womb. Her legs branched out, just as the wood branches out from these eternal trees around us; but she was not hardy as they. My wife groaned with blood and ceased to breathe. Aye!, a scornful eve that bred the kind of pain only a god can withstand.
Roman Payne
There is nothing that fear or hope does not make men believe.
Vauvenargues
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
Anaïs Nin
He who has learned to look to God in everything he does is at the same time diverted from all vain thoughts.
John Calvin
I sat up in the strange bed fearing it had been a dream, afraid I would never see her again. Not because I wanted anything from her, only her presence. The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death.
Roman Payne
Hold on hold fast hold out. Patience is genius.
Georges de Buffon
We are not certain we are never certain.
Albert Camus
Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.
Gustave Flaubert
You used to give yourself over to endless sessions of doubt. You would claim to be an expert on the subject. But doubting would tire you so much that you would end up doubting doubt itself. I saw you one day at the end of an afternoon of solitary speculation. You were unmoving and petrified. Running several kilometers in a deep forest full of ravines and pitfalls would have exhausted you less.
Édouard Levé
To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place -- an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City...a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.
Michel de Certeau
his conscience washed clean by happiness.
Françoise Sagan
Death lasts only a moment, but we think about it every moment. (La mort ne dure qu'un instant, - Mais on y pense chaque instant)
Charles de Leusse
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
Milan Kundera
My enthusiasms ... constitute my reserves my unexploited resources perhaps my future.
E. M. Cioran
We are almost always bored by just those whom we must not find boring.
François de La Rochefoucauld
It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!
Roman Payne
We have too much technological progress, life is too hectic, and our society has only one goal: to invent still more technological marvels to make life even easier and better. The craving for every new scientific discovery breeds a hunger for greater comfort and the constant struggle to achieve it. All that kills the soul, kills compassion, understanding, nobility. It leaves no time for caring what happens to other people, least of all criminals. Even the officials in Venezuela's remote areas are better for they're also concerned with public peace. It gives them many headaches, but they seem to believe that bringing about a man's salvation is worth the effort. I find that magnificent.
Henri Charrière
He was troubled; this brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; there was a cloud in this crystal.
Victor Hugo
... endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, despite their difference in quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling.
Marcel Proust
The tyranny of maternal duty is not new, but it has become considerably more pronounced with the rise of naturalism, and it has thus far produced neither a matriarchy nor sexual equality, but rather a regression in women's status.
Élisabeth Badinter
I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about the rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. the marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force
Frantz Fanon
Tis no wonder, says one of the ancients, that chance has so great a dominion over us, since it is by chance we live.
Michel de Montaigne
Oh would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas as the tree does its withered leaves!
André Gide
The majority is the best way because it is visible and has strength to make itself obeyed. Yet it is the opinion of the least able.
Blaise Pascal
There is a natural prejudice which prompts men to despise whomsoever has been their inferior long after he has become their equal.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Those who plead their cause in the absence of an opponent can invent to their heart's content, can pontificate without taking into account the opposite point of view and keep the best arguments for themselves, for aggressors are always quick to attack those who have no means of defence.
Christine de Pizan