Quotes by French Authors - Page 66

De temps à autre, il est bon de faire une pause dans notre quête du bonheur et d'être simplement heureux.
Guillaume Apollinaire
The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.
Charles de Gaulle
The art of statemanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness...A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there.
Anaïs Nin
A new problem appears: devices that optimize the performance of the human body for the purpose of producing proof require additional expenditures. No money, no proof - and that means no verification of statements and no truth. The games of scientific language become the games of the rich, in which whoever is the wealthiest has the best chance of being right. An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established.
Jean-François Lyotard
But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at a time during a slow descent. The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads. And thus, gradually, it stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape. That doesn’t have to mean dissolution, as if the walker were fading away to become a mere inflection, a footnote. It’s more a flashing moment: sudden flame, time catching fire. And here, the feeling of eternity is all at once that vibration between presences. Eternity, here, in a spark.
Frédéric Gros
Until I saw Chardin's painting I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house in the half-cleared table in the corner of a tablecloth left awry in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.
Marcel Proust
He had so long since ceased to direct his life toward any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of quotidian satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself that he would remain all his life in that condition, which only death could alter.
Marcel Proust
Courage! I have shown it for years think you I shall lose it at the moment when my sufferings are to end?
Marie Antoinette
As for moral courage, it is very rare, he said, to find that kind found at 2 o'clock in the morning; that is to say, courage in the face of the unexpected.
Napoléon Bonaparte
A single radio post still heard him. The only link between him and the world was a wave of music, a minor modulation. Not a lament, no cry, yet purest of sounds that ever spoke despair.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Decisiveness is often the art of timely cruelty.
Henry Becque
If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciproc
Voltaire
The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.
Maurice Blanchot
The past is bound to be fragmentary, bound to be reconstructed, bound to be reinvented. It serves only to collect the truths of today. If our present is the child of the past, our past is the child of the present. And the future will be the harvester of our bastard offspring.
Amin Maalouf
The hand that gives is among the hand that takes. Money has no fatherland, financiers are without patriotism and without decency, their sole object is gain.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Anaïs Nin
Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.
Marcel Proust
There are few things we should keenly desire if we really knew what we wanted.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. 'Lost Illusion' is the undisclosed title of every novel.
André Maurois
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Hypocrisy is the homage which vice renders to virtue.
La Rochefoucauld
All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.
Alain Badiou
In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
Albert Camus
Do you know how I picture God myself?" he said. "As an enormous, creative organ beyond our ken, who scatters millions of worlds into space, just as one single fish would deposit its spawn in the sea. He creates because it is His function as God to do so, but He does not know what He is doing and is stupidly prolific in His work and is ignorant of the combinations of all kinds which are produced by His scattered germs.
Guy de Maupassant
Sin can be forgiven, but stupid is forever.
Coco Chanel
What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.
André Breton
I have often been charged with falsehood and hypocrisy, yet there lives not the man who would more gladly than I speak truthfully and lay bare his heart; but as I have not one idea, one feeling in common with the people who surround me, as the very first word I should speak truthfully would cause a general hue and cry, I have preferred to keep silent, or, if I do speak, to utter only stupid commonplaces which everyone has agreed to believe in.
Théophile Gautier
All that I ask out of life is that it be constant and unending euphoria.
Roman Payne
Toutes les erreurs de la critique commises à mon égard, à mes débuts, furent qu'elle ne vit pas qu'il ne fallait rien définir, rien comprendre, rien limiter, rien préciser, parce que tout ce qui est sincèrement et docilement nouveau - comme le beau d'ailleurs, porte sa signification en soi-même. La désignation par un titre mis à mes dessins est quelquefois de trop, pour ainsi dire. Le titre n'y est justifié que lorsqu'il est vague, indéterminé, et visant même confusément à l'équivoque. Mes dessins inspirent et ne se définissent pas. Ils ne déterminent rien. Ils nous placent, ainsi que la musique, dans le monde ambigu de l'indéterminé. Ils sont une sorte de métaphore.
Odilon Redon
We must unceasingly ask for [perseverance] by making use of the means which God has taught us for obtaining it: prayer, fasting, almsgiving, frequenting the sacraments, association with good companions, and hearing and reading Holy Scripture.
Francis de Sales
Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.
Blaise Pascal
Do not be alarmed if they look paler than the other maidens of Greece. They are scarcely of this Earth, and seem to be shaking off the sleep of a past life.
Charles Nodier
When a man loves a woman, as our old troubadours used to say, even if he has heard or seen something that puts his beloved in a bad light, he should believe neither his ears nor his eyes, he should listen to his heart alone.
Marquis de Sade
In this becalmed zone the sea has a smooth surface, the palm-tree stirs gently in the breeze, the waves lap against the pebbles and raw materials are ceaselessly transported, justifying the presence of the settler; and all the while the native, bent double, near dead than alive, exists interminably in an unchanging dream. The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey... Over against him torpid creatures, wasted by fever, obsessed by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic background for the innovating dynamism of colonial mercantilism.
Frantz Fanon
In the afternoon the digestion of the meal deprives me of the incomparable lightness which characterizes the fast days.
Adalbert de Vogüé
Perfection consists not in doing extraordinary things but in doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
Angelique Arnauld
Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governm
Guy de Maupassant
I'm in love with New York. It matches my mood. I'm not overwhelmed. It is the suitable scene for my ever ever heightened life. I love the proportions, the amplitude, the brilliance, the polish, the solidity. I look up at Radio City insolently and love it. It's all great, and Babylonian. Broadway at night. Cellophane. The newness. The vitality. True, it is only physical. But it's inspiring. Just bring your own contents, and you create a sparkle of the highest power. I'm not moved, not speechless. I stand straight, tough and I meet the impact. I feel the glow and the dancing in everything. The radio music in the taxis, scientific magic, which can all be used lyrically. That's my last word. Give New York to a poet. He can use it. It can be poetized. Or maybe that's mania of mine, to poetize. I live lightly, smoothly, actively, ears or eyes wide open, alert, oiled! I feel the glow and the dancing in every thing and the tempo is like that of my blood. I'm at once beyond, over and in New York, tasting it fully.
Anaïs Nin
There is no passion so much transports thesincerity of judgement as doth anger
Michel de Montaigne
By appealing to his imagination, a pornographic novel brings the reader’s body into play; libertine fiction appeals only to his mind. The goal of the former is erotic pleasure, or rather the desire to experience erotic pleasure, which the pornographic novel, obviously, cannot satisfy by itself. It is in this regard merely an intermediary, a stimulant, a kind of literary pimp.With libertine fiction, the goal is that of overcoming the prejudices of some of the characters, which are assumed to be the same as those of the reader. The reader is somewhat the equivalent of the fictional object of seduction.
Jean-Marie Goulemot
The forest is only waiting for their signal to start trembling, hissing, and roaring from its depths. An enormous, love-maddened, unlighted railway station, full to bursting. Whole trees bristling with living noise makers, mutilated erections, horror.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
You see, the thing about working with pirates is that they know what they are doing. They already know more than you do because they are sailing and raiding. They are the experts in your organization, and you need to get them on your side, not turn them against you. Here is how to deal with a pirate ship model in ten simple steps: 1. Respect the pirates. (They know how to execute.) 2. Invite the pirates to the table. Recognize their wins. 3. Ask the pirates to report on what they see and hear. 4. Ask the pirates to report on their wins and losses. 5. Ask the pirates how you can help them win more....
Olivier J. Blanchard
There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.
Boris Vian
...And we left the lightfor the night of the street
Pierre Albert-Birot
Jesus Christ is a God whom we approach without pride and before whom we humble ourselves without despair.
Blaise Pascal
You need not cry very loud he is nearer to us than we think.
Brother Lawrence
They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.
Émile Zola
What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Once men are caught up in an event they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men.
Antoine de St. Exupery
[About Pierre de Fermat] It cannot be denied that he has had many exceptional ideas, and that he is a highly intelligent man. For my part, however, I have always been taught to take a broad overview of things, in order to be able to deduce from them general rules, which might be applicable elsewhere.
René Descartes
If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astonishing results are the three criteria of a human genius, who could dare compare any great man in history with Muhammad?
Alphonse de Lamartine
Truth exists. Only lies are invented.
Georges Braque
The only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who passed censure upon it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Betrayed and wronged in everything,I’ll flee this bitter world where vice is king,And seek some spot unpeopled and apartWhere I’ll be free to have an honest heart.
Molière
Will it be here that we shall find a place which will not elude us, or which if it remains does not exert on us a culpable attraction? Or must we, leaning over the deck and watching the shores glide by, move forever onward?
André Gide
... the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a supply of fresh meat for her offspring after her own decease, calls in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive cruelty, and, having made a collection of weevils and spiders, proceeds with marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions) depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which her egg is laid, will furnish the larva, when it is hatched, with a tamed and inoffensive quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder...
Marcel Proust
I respect only those who resist me but cannot tolerate them.
Charles de Gaulle
I am not afraid. ... I was born to do this.
Joan of Arc
Hope is the greatest madness. What can we expect of a world that we enter with the assurance of seeing our fathers and mothers die? A world where, if two beings love each other and give their lives to each other, both can be sure that one will watch the other perish?
Alfred de Vigny