Quotes by French Authors - Page 71

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.
Michel de Montaigne
Superfluity was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these hedges, these paths. Vainly I strove to compute the number of the chestnut trees, or their distance from the Velleda, or their height as compared with that of the plane trees; each of them escaped from the pattern I made for it, overflowed from it or withdrew. And I too among them, vile, languorous, obscene, chewing the cud of my thoughts, I too was superfluous. [I is you or I or anyone.] Luckily I did not feel it, I only understood it, but I felt uncomfortable because I was afraid of feeling it. . . . I thought vaguely of doing away with myself, to do away with at least one of these superfluous existences. But my death – my corpse, my blood poured out on this gravel, among these plants, in this smiling garden – would have been superfluous as well. I was superfluous to all eternity.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
Milan Kundera
All for one and one for all, united we stand divided we fall.
Alexandre Dumas
In the perfect Capitalist State there would be no food available for the non-owner save when he was actually engaged in Production, and that absurdity would, by quickly ending all human lives save those of the owners, put a term to the arrangement.
Hilaire Belloc
Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift.
Milan Kundera
The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second
Jean-Luc Godard
I would like to paint the way a bird sings.
Claude Monet
In the case of everything that belongs to the realm of sentiment, religion, politics, morality, the affections, and antipathies, etc. The most eminent men seldom surpass the standard of the most ordinary individuals.
Gustave Le Bon
It is difficult to frighten those who are easily astonished; ignorance causes fearlessness. Children have so little claim on hell, that if they should see it they would admire it.
Victor Hugo
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
Roland Barthes
But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.
Jean-Paul Sartre
L'espoir est la chose la plus difficile à tuer dans le cœur d'une femme amoureuse.
Diane Ducret
The key to wisdom is doubt!
Marjane Satrapi
Jealousy devours us, we are its dish of the day. (Jalousie nous dévore. - Nous sommes son plat du jour)
Charles de Leusse
What a wonderful thing it is to have a good friend. He identifies your innermost desires and spares you the embarrassment of disclosing them to him yourself.
Jean de La Fontaine
Friendship which is of its nature a delicate thing fastidious slow of growth is easily checked will hesitate demur recoil where love good old blustering love bowls ahead and blunders through every obstacle.
Colette
Today, the mere idea of aristocracy is incompatible with the dominant ideology. But every people needs an aristocracy. It's an integral part of human nature and can't be dispensed with. The question then is not 'For or against aristocracy?' but 'What kind of aristocracy?
Guillaume Faye
If after all men cannot always make history have a meaning they can always act so that their own lives have one.
Albert Camus
Friendship throws out deep roots in honest hearts, D'Artagnan. Believe me, it is only the evil-minded who deny friendship; they cannot understand it.
Alexandre Dumas
It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.
Milan Kundera
Know that there is often hidden in us a dormant poet, always young and alive.
Paul de Musset
Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what dictates the choice nor why, among the millions of human beings we might be, it is the being we were the day before that we unerringly grasp.
Marcel Proust
Welcome everything that comes to you but do not long for anything else.
André Gide
The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.
Anaïs Nin
Love is not consolation. It is light.
Simone Weil
Let us leave political questions to be decided by the powers concerned," Sir Ralph would say, "as we have adopted a form of government which forbids us to discuss our interests ourselves. If a nation is responsible for the faults of its legislature, what one can you find that is guiltier than yours?
George Sand
I never lose sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled.
Anaïs Nin
People will never respond to you more positively than when you seek to make your impact felt at the human level.
Cendrine Marrouat
Want to play hangman? asks Theophile, and I ache to tell him that I have enough on my plate playing quadriplegic. But my communication system disqualifies repartee: the keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it takes several minutes to thrust it home. By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what had seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter. So the rule is to avoid impulsive sallies. It deprives conversation of its sparkle, all those gems you bat back and forth like a ball-and I count this forced lack of humor one of the great drawbacks of my condition.
Jean-Dominique Bauby
And thus, the actions of life often not allowing any delay, it is a truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine the most true opinions we ought to follow the most probable.
René Descartes
A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs.
Gustave Le Bon
Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.
Anaïs Nin
Everything had become song. The curve of the road beneath the clouds here, and there the strokes of dark earth, the green and the gray, the torn pink of clay and gravel under fingertips. The consonance was above all that of the muffled shadow and grass to the depths of sky, where a flutter of cheerful feathers quivered.In these dreams there are also black walnut trees, and then a forest that opens in a breeze. Nothing. Nothing more than the obstinate sound of wind.
Deborah Heissler
In all aspects of life, we take on a part and an appearance to seem to be what we wish to be--and thus the world is merely composed of actors.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
Étienne de La Boétie
My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.
Marcel Proust
Men argue nature acts.
Voltaire
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
André Gide
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
Simone de Beauvoir
If I created a new depravity I would be a priestess, while my imitators would founder, after my reign, in abominable filth...Don't you think that proud men, copying Satan, are more guilty than the Satan of the Bible, who invented pride? Is Satan not respectable because of his unprecedented and divinely inspired sin?
Rachilde
Once conform once do what others do because they do it and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
Michel de Montaigne
A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.
Jean-Paul Sartre
There is no business in the world so troublesome as the pursuit of fame: life is over before you have hardly begun your work.
Jean de La Bruyère
Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment. Being in love is nothing, it’s sticking together that’s difficult. Faeces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or to grow. On this score we are far more unfortunate than shit: our frenzy to persist in our present state — that’s the unconscionable torture.
Voyage au bout de la nuit
I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.
Gustave Flaubert
ContrastsThe windows of my poetry are wide open on the boulevards and in the shop windowsShineThe precious stones of lightListen to the violins of the limousines and the xylophones of the linotypesThe sketcher washes with the hand-towel of the skyAll is color spotsAnd the hats of the women passing by are comets in the conflagration of the eveningUnity There's no more unityAll the clocks now read midnight after being set back ten minutesThere's no more time.There's no more money.In the ChamberThey are spoiling the marvelous elements of raw material("Contrasts")
Blaise Cendrars
But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that made life semilife and men semimen. He wished to put his life on one of a pair of scales and death on the other. He wished each of his acts, indeed each day, each hour, each second of his life to be measured against the supreme criterion, which is death. That was why he wanted to march at the head of the column, to walk on a tightrope over an abyss, to have a halo of bullets around his head and thus to grow in everyone's eyes and become unlimited as death is unlimited. . .
Milan Kundera
But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do. And what is that compared to the magnificent uselessness of a woman's face? Mersault was aware of this now, delighting in his vanity and smiling at his secret demons.
Albert Camus
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
Roland Barthes
Toleration is the best religion.
Victor Hugo
Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.
André Breton
Never subject to the rules, believing that the correct judgement and healthy nature keep her in the honesty she lived in.
Émile Zola
The beautiful is always bizarre.
Charles Baudelaire
The ego is like a clever monkey, which can co-opt anything, even the most spiritual practices, so as to expand itself. (155)
Jean-Yves Leloup
Interest speaks all sorts of tongues and plays all sorts of parts even that of disinterestedness.
François de La Rochefoucauld
The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.
Voltaire
If I were to share Jaques' existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious.
Simone de Beauvoir
Whilst the wolflets bayed, A grave was made, And then with the strokes of a silver spade, It was filled to make a mound. And for two cold days and three long nights, The father tended that holy plot; And stayed by where his wife was laid, In the grave within the ground.
Roman Payne
I am he who cometh out of the depths. My lords, you are great and rich. There lies your danger. You profit by the night; but beware! The dawn is all-powerful. You cannot prevail over it. It is coming. Nay! it is come. Within it is the day-spring of irresistible light. And who shall hinder that sling from hurling the sun into the sky. The sun I speak of is Right. You are Privilege. Tremble!
Victor Hugo