Quotes by French Authors - Page 67

We made love outdoors—without a roof, I like most, without stove, my favorite place, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and dripping with dew, and our love for each other was seen. Our love for the world was new.
Roman Payne
Art is either revolution or plagiarism
Paul Gauguin
The past and present are only our means the future is always our end. Thus we never really live but only hope to live.
Blaise Pascal
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
Victor Hugo
Le livre est un morceau de silence dans les mains du lecteur. Celui qui écrit se tait. Celui qui lit ne rompt pas le silence.
Pascal Quignard
As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
Milan Kundera
This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.
Anaïs Nin
For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.
Marcel Proust
High heels? Painful pleasure.
Christian Dior
Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.
Albert Schweitzer
The world is always satisfied, it turns out, with countenance it can understand. Indolence and cowardice do the rest. Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence.
Albert Camus
All for one and one for all.
Alexandre Dumas
I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.
Michel Foucault
Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that good deity who restores to younger men their gaiety and to old men their youth...fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare not attempt when sober.
Michel de Montaigne
Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.
Guy Debord
We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.
Michel de Montaigne
In forming an estimate of sins, we are often imposed upon by imagining that the more hidden the less heinous they are.
John Calvin
In jealousy there is more of self-love than love.
François de La Rochefoucauld
And for five years it was no longer possible to enjoy the call of birds in the cool of the evening. We were forced to despair. We were cut off from the world because to each moment clung a whole mass of mortal images. For five years the earth has not seen a single morning without death agonies, a single evening without prisons, a noon without slaughter.
Albert Camus
This sometimes happened: from time to time, Dantès, driven out of solitude into the world, felt an imperative need for solitude. And what solitude is more vast and more poetic than that of a ship sailing alone on the sea, in the darkness of night and the silence of infinity, under the eye of the Lord?
Alexandre Dumas
I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.
Alexandre Dumas
Motherhood is a vocation like any other. It should be freely chosen, not imposed upon woman.
Anaïs Nin
Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.
Napoléon Bonaparte
There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
Henri Bergson
We must not seek happiness in peace but in conflict.
Paul Claudel
Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.
Albert Schweitzer
With wine and being lost, withless and less of both:I rode through the snow, do you read meI rode God far--I rode Godnear, he sang,it wasour last ride overthe hurdled humans.They cowered whenthey heard usoverhead, theywrote, theylied our neighinginto one of theirimage-ridden languages.
Paul Celan
The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
Michel Foucault
And of a Sunday swarm the folkUnder the honeysuckle vine, Quaffing, the while they talk and smoke, The sun, the melody, the wine.
Théophile Gautier
...but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty.
Marcel Proust
Set your dreams where nobody hides, give your tears to the tide...
M83
I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.
Francine du Plessix Gray
It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.
Jean Baudrillard
But vilifying those we love always detaches us from them a little. We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
Gustave Flaubert
Look!You want to see? See! Feast your eyes, glut your soul on my cursed ugliness! Look at Erik's face! Now you know the face of the voice! You were not content to hear me, eh? You wanted to know what I looked like? Oh, you women are so inquisitive! Well, are you satisfied? I'm a good-looking fellow, eh?...When a woman has seen me, as you have, she belongs to me.She loves me forever! I am a kind of Don Juan, you know!...Look at me! I am Don Juan Triumphant! -Erik in The Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
Roland Barthes
Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
But the vain man did not hear him. Vain men never hear anything but praise.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorours and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours.
Marcel Proust
The Infinite struck the void with the sound of the Word.
Marek Halter
The past is an obdurate stranger that puts as many marks on us as we attempt to impose on it.
Joanne Harris
emotion is first of all and in principle an accident
Jean-Paul Sartre
If I advance follow me! If I retreat kill me! If I die avenge me!
La Rochefoucauld
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
Marie Curie
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The mania of thinking renders one unfit for every activity.
Anatole France
But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.
Marcel Proust
My father was a Creole his father a Negro and his father a monkey my family it seems begins where yours left off.
Alexander Dumas
Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity.
Coco Chanel
... the old Berlin – last vestige of a mysterious fête – wheeled away from the gravelled road and went lurching noiselessly across country over a grass-grown track. Beyond the hedge nothing could be seen of it but the driver's cap bobbing up and down.
Alain-Fournier
The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.
Guy Debord
Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen.
Emil M. Cioran
On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
Albert Camus
Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.
Jean Baudrillard
To err his human, to stroll is Parisian.
Victor Hugo
The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.
Henri Bergson
A cowardly act! What do I care about that? You may be sure that I should never fear to commit one if it were to my advantage.
Napoleon
And the thing has been said and said well have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
Anatole France
In Swann's mind, however, these words, meeting no opposition, settled and hardened until they assumed the indestructibility of a truth so indubitable that, if some friend happened to tell him that he had come by the same train and had not seen Odette, Swann would have been convinced that it was his friend who had made a mistake as to the day or hour, since his version did not agree with the words uttered by Odette. These words had never appeared to him false except when, before hearing them, he had suspected that they were going to be. For him to believe that she was lying, and anticipatory suspicion was indispensable.
Marcel Proust