Quotes by French Authors - Page 73

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.
Julio Cortázar
Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful place in a house is the lavatory.
Théophile Gautier
The king who has the broad bean does not have one whole wafer. (Le roi qui a la fève - N'a la galette entière.)
Charles de Leusse
Never be hurried in anything. Do all things calmly and in a spirit of repose. Do not lose your inward peace even if everything seems to be going wrong. What is anything in life compared to peace of soul?
Francis de Sales
Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he will always see that word: murder—immortally inscribed upon the pediment of that vast slaughterhouse—humanity.
Octave Mirbeau
It is God who makes woman beautiful it is the devil who makes her pretty.
Victor Hugo
We are never so happy nor so unhappy as we imagine.
La Rochefoucauld
Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
Emil M. Cioran
His entire body was pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could she give him to cure his doubt?
Anaïs Nin
Live to the point of tears.
Albert Camus
Forgive me, Bertrand, for having on that day loved in you a beauty in which your self-esteem could take no pride, which could not in any way determine my affection.
Marcel Proust
Those who set up a fictitious worship, merely worship and adore their own delirious fancies; indeed, they would never dare so to trifle with God, had they not previously fashioned him after their own childish conceits.
John Calvin
I didn't know the first thing about the people around me, but that didn't matter: I was in a new world; and I had the feelings that at last I had put my finger on the secret of freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir
Let us love. Let our lives be a perpetual song of love for God, first of all, and for all human beings who suffer, love, and mourn. Let deep joy live in us. Let us be like the lark, enemy of the night, who always announces the dawn and awakens in each creature the love of light and life. Let us awaken others to the spiritual life.
Elizabeth LeSeur
Everyone without exception is searching for happiness.
Blaise Pascal
In cities where peace and the arts flourish, men are more consumed by jealousy, worry, and anxiety than they are in cities under the blight of a besieging army. Private sorrows are more bitter than public suffering.
Voltaire
Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, ‘Look at my beautiful home! Isn’t it fine?’ And not, ‘Look at the home so-and-so has built.’ Thus we shouldn’t cry, ‘Look what so-and-so has written. What a genius so-and-so is!’ But rather, ‘Look at what I have read! Am I not a genius? Have I not invented these pages? The walls of this universe, did I not build? The souls of these characters, did I not weave?
Roman Payne
I haven’t had any adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But not adventures. It isn’t a matter of words; I am beginning to understand. There is something I longed for more than all the rest - without realizing it properly. It wasn’t love, heaven forbid, nor glory, nor wealth. It was…anyway, I had imagined that at certain moments my life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: all I asked for was a little order. There is nothing very splendid about my life at present: but now and then, for example when they played music in the cafés, I would l look back and say to myself: in the old days, in London, Meknés, Tokyo, I have known wonderful moments, I have had adventures. It is that which has been taken away from me now. I have just learnt, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years. Adventures are in books. And naturally, everything they tell you about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It was to this way of happening that I attached so much importance.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Mais, dans la mort d’un homme, un monde inconnu meurt, et je me demandais quelles étaient les images qui sombraient en lui.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
It is as if the angels had just done their laundry and, owning no other wealth than love, they are always clothed in the same light, worn transparent from so many washings.
Christian Bobin
It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.
Jean Baudrillard
Even if misfortune is only good for bringing a fool to his senses it would still be just to deem it good for something.
Jean de La Fontaine
No one is a good historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples, if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian of their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the exterior also...True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything.
Victor Hugo
The universe is full of men going through the same motions in the same surroundings, but carrying within themselves, and projecting around them, universes as mutually remote as the constellations.
Emmanuel Mounier
We should tend our freedom wisely.
Michel de Montaigne
The self-esteem one acquires and a well-earned feeling of one's strength are the only consolation in this world. Income, after all, most brutes have that.
Paul Gauguin
There are men who are happy without knowing it.
Vauvenargues
...the most sacred right of a person is to refuse o be manipulated, handled, cheated, and then kicked in the ass---.
Romain Gary
Among the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things ... only one, which began a century and a half ago ... has allowed the figure of man to appear.
Michel Foucault
Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him.
Albert Camus
We ought to punish pitilessly that shameful pretence of friendly intercourse. I like a man to be a man, and to show on all occasions the bottom of his heart in his discourse. Let that be the thing to speak, and never let our feelings be beneath vain compliments
Molière
There is no need, in order to explain three-quarters of the opinions held about people, to go so far as a love that has been spurned or an exclusion from political power. Our judgment remains unsure: an invitation refused or received determines it.
Marcel Proust
Of whom and of what can I say: "I know that"! This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled.
Albert Camus
Men spend their time in following a ball or a hare it is the pleasure even of kings.
Blaise Pascal
Be patient and one day you will be in Heaven, where there will be only peace and joy ... You will possess an enduring tranquility and rest.
Francis de Sales
Whether democracy or aristocracy is the better form of government constitutes a very difficult question. But, clearly, democracy inconveniences one person while aristocracy oppresses another. That is a truth which establishes itself and precludes any discussion: you are rich and I am poor.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I looked on, I thought, I reflected, I admired, in a state of stupefaction not altogether unmingled with fear!
Jules Verne
We never live but we are always in the expectation of living.
Voltaire
For others, in spite of myself, from myself.
Emmanuel Levinas
Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.
André Breton
Man is so made that whenever anything fires his soul impossibilities vanish.
Jean de La Fontaine
The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
Albert Camus
When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher.
Frédéric Chopin
Sow good services sweet remembrances will grow from them.
Madame de Stael
We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Their own life together was like a subtle watercolor sketch, invisible to other people. They gave the world what it required of them and for the rest of the time were content to be forgotten.
Andreï Makine
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
Edgar Degas
-Хүү минь, чи надад ямар ч өргүй гэж бодож явах эрхийг би чамд олголоо.
Honoré de Balzac
Words like eyeglasses blur everything that they do not make clear.
Joseph Joubert
A normal existence - what could be more irrational? It's fantastic the number of things you're forced not to think about in order to go from one end of the day to the other without jumping the track! And the number of memories that have to be driven from your mind, and truths that have to be evaded! "That's why I'm afraid to leave,' I said to myself. In Paris, near Robert, I manage without too much difficulty to avoid the traps; I carefully mark them, and there are alarm bells to warn me of dangers. But alone, under an unknown sky, what would happen to me? What truths would come suddenly to blind me? What chasms would open before me? Oh yes, chasms close, truths fade out - that is sure and certain; I've seen it happen often enough before. We're like those earthworms one vainly cuts in two, or those lobsters whose legs grow back again. But the moment of false agony, the moment you'd rather die than mend yourself once again - when I think of it, I lose heart. I try to reason with myself: 'Why should anything happen to me? But why shouldn't anything happen to me?' It's never safe to go off the beaten path. It's true, I feel a little stifled here, but you get used to being stifled. And a habit is never bad, despite what they say.
Simone de Beauvoir
Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie.(There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.)
Michel de Montaigne
She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive.
Marcel Proust
Hope deceitful as it is serves at least to lead us to the end of life along an agreeable road.
La Rochefoucauld
It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though limits to our abilities do not exist.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself & in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, & human existence is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation; a life justifies itself only if its effort to perpetuate itself is integrated into its surpassing & if this surpassing has no other limits than those which the subject assigns himself.
Simone de Beauvoir
Nothing is better than music.... It has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.
Nadia Boulanger
She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:--"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you."She tried to smile once more and expired.
Victor Hugo
The Smile of a Child enlarge the universe (D'un enfant le sourire - Agrandit l'univers)
Charles de Leusse
And, why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you, your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great -that is, for "great men"; and it's "silly". Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because, you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way; or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty -so as to be forgiven; or to forgot, to bury it until next time.
Hélène Cixous