Quotes by French Authors - Page 72

Words do not always need a destination.We can leave them behind us at the borders of feelings.Running around headless in the vague zone.And that is the privilege of artists: to live in confusion.
David Foenkinos
How was she to reconcile men's desire with the desire to be beautiful in their eyes? At first she had tried for a compromise (desperate journeys abroad, where nobody knew her and no indiscretion could betray her); then, later on, she had gone radical and sacrificed her erotic life to her beauty.
Milan Kundera
Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.
Claude Monet
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
Victor Hugo
Every ideal comes from us as do all the amenities of life, in order to make our existence as simple reproducers, for which divine Providence solely intended us, less monotonous and less hard.
Guy de Maupassant
Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.
Marcel Duchamp
The depth of our compassion is proportional to the depth of our living. (65)
Jean-Yves Leloup
If you start to take Vienna take Vienna.
Napoléon Bonaparte
...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.
Jacques Lacan
The man slips along the stoically congealed houses Perpendicular like them A moving ornament Burning fiction His fragility contradicts the duration of his torments
Hélène Baronne d’Oettingen
The truth is that this is the only way I can live: in two directions. I need two lives. I am two beings. When I return to Hugo in the evening, to the peace and warmth of the house, I return with deep contentment, as if this was the only condition for me. I bring home to Hugo a whole woman, freed of all 'possessed' fevers, cured of the poison of restlessness and curiosity which used to threaten our marriage, cured through action. Our love lives, because I live. I sustain and feed it. I am loyal to it, in my own way, which cannot be his way. If he ever reads these lines, he must believe me. I am writing calmly, lucidly while waiting for him to come home, as one waits for the chosen lover, the eternal one.
Anaïs Nin
Weak people cannot be sincere.
La Rochefoucauld
We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.
Anaïs Nin
I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine
Albert Camus
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
Victor Hugo
It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be possible to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and panelled halls.
Hugh of Saint-Victor
Supposing I know of a flower that is absolutely unique, that is nowhere to be found except on my planet, and any minute that flower could accidentally be eaten up by a little lamb, isn't that important? If a person loves a flower that is the only one of its kind on all the millions and millions of stars, then gazing at the night sky is enough to make him happy. He says to himself "My flower is out there somewhere." But if the lamb eats the flower, then suddenly it's as if all the stars had stopped shining. Isn't that important?
Antoine De Saint Exupery
One must count ones riches by the means one has to satisfy his desires.
Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles
No one is ever satisfied where he is.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
As if one killed by calculation! A person kills only from an impulse that springs from his blood and sinews, from the vestiges of ancient struggles, from the need to live and the joy of being strong.
Émile Zola
You've been the rabbi here for thirty years and these guys who've never set foot here want to decide who should be rabbi or not. And to lead prayer in Hebrew for Jews who speak Arabic, they want you to write in French. So I say they're nuts.
Joann Sfar
This water was indeed a different thing from ordinary nourishment. Its sweetness was born of the walk under the stars, the song of the pulley, the effort of my arms. It was good for the heart, like a present.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Music is another planet.
Alphonse Daudet
I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.
Michel de Montaigne
To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry.If a man who speaks pidgin to a man of color or an Arab does not see anything wrong or evil in such behavior, it is because he has never stopped to think.
Frantz Fanon
At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls,you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest without passion without business without entertainment without care. It is then that he recognizes that he is empty insufficient dependent ineffectual. From the depths of his soul now comes at once boredom gloom sorrow chagrin resentment and despair.
Blaise Pascal
The fate of a nation has often depended on the good or bad digestion of a prime minister.
Voltaire
There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.
Jean Baudrillard
Perish the universe, provided I have my revenge!
Cyrano de Bergerac
He had come to that time in his life (it varies for every man) when a human being gives himself over to his demon or to his genius according to a mysterious law which orders him either to destroy or to surpass himself.
Marguerite Yourcenar
I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all. . .
Anaïs Nin
The truth for a man, it's what makes him a man.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
If a soldier or labourer complains of the hardship of his lot set him to do nothing.
Blaise Pascal
Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.
Albert Camus
Moreover, man carries in his heart the desire always to wield his scientific knowledge in service of the greater good. He would of course never use it for destructive purposes. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! ...
Jacques Tardi
life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat.
Anaïs Nin
To be ambitious for wealth and yet always expecting to be poor to be always doubting your ability to get what you long for is like trying to reach east by traveling west. There is no philosophy which will help a man to succeed when he is always doubting his ability to do so and thus attracting failure. No matter how hard you work for success if your thought is saturated with the fear of failure it will kill your efforts neutralize your endeavors and make success impossible.
Charles Baudouin
I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
Simone de Beauvoir
She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.
Charles Baudelaire
But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .
Emil M. Cioran
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
Anatole France
Moral wounds have this peculiarity - they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.
Alexandre Dumas
He [Muffat] experienced a sense of pleasure mingled with remorse, the sort of pleasure peculiar to those Catholics whom the fear of hell spurs on to commit sin.
Émile Zola
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
Albert Camus
Socialism must come down from the brain and reach the heart.
Jules Renard
My life didn't please me, so I created my life.
Coco Chanel
...since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?
Albert Camus
Elegance comes from being as beautiful inside as outside.
Coco Chanel
I am not afraid I was born to do this.
Jeanne d'Arc
Force and not opinion is the queen of the world but it is opinion that uses the force.
Pascal
If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.
Albert Camus
Man always becomes other. Man is the animal who continually differs from himself.
Georges Bataille
A woman never sees what we do for her she only sees what we don't do.
Georges Courteline
To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,--while society fraternity is based on resemblances.The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul, -and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which Andre Gide belongs.The misfortune of these beings, when they express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob consents to admit such souls, it is as curiosities or museum objects. Their glory is, finally, to be loved from afar & almost understood, as parchments are seen & read above sealed cases.
Rémy de Gourmont
Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality.
Pierre Bayard
You'll stop hurting when you stop hoping.
Guillaume Musso
Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.
Gustave Flaubert
Men fear silence as they fear solitude because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.
André Maurois