Quotes by French Authors - Page 74

He will unfailingly be pleased with our patience and take note of our diligence and perseverance.
Francis de Sales
Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.
La Rochefoucauld
Why, there's the air, the sky, the morning, the evening, moonlight, my friends, women, the beautiful architecture of Paris to study, three big books to write and all sorts of other things. Anaxagoras used to say that he was in the world in order to admire the sun. And then I have the good fortune to be able to spend my days from morning to night in the company of a man of genius - myself - and it's very pleasant.
Victor Hugo
It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus.
Roland Barthes
Follow your own way of speaking to our Lord sincerely lovingly confidently and simply as your heart dictates.
Jane Frances de Chantal
What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
Roland Barthes
It is from the death of the social that socialism will emerge, as it is from the death of God that religions emerge.
Jean Baudrillard
To hold power has always meant to manipulate idiots and circumstances; and those circumstances and those idiots, tossed together, bring about those coincidences to which even the greatest men confess they owe most of their fame
Alfred de Vigny
We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.
Milan Kundera
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.
Henri Bergson
But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.
Muriel Barbery
Rejoicing in his absolute authority, the single egoist will exploit it methodically, whereas a mêlée of egoists will bring about a ruinous disorder and a disastrous cleavage, because the contrariety of the appetites to be satisfied will prevent the satisfaction of any single one. Clearly, then, the effect of the pursuit of private ends under cover of the public good will be worse if there are many with a hand in power than if there is only one.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
Suddenly, it seems obvious to me: Only fantasy books can make sense of the skewed reality in which I live.
David B.
He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with.
Guy Debord
In the case of the solitary, his seclusion, even when it is absolute and ends only with life itself, has often as its primary cause a disordered love of the crowd, which so far overruled every other feeling that, not being able to win, when he goes out, the admiration of his hall-porter, of the passers-by, of the cabman whom he hails, he prefers not to be seen by them at all, and with that object abandons every activity that would oblige him to go out of doors.
Marcel Proust
A man like you is a god, not just a machine covered with skin, but a theater where fine feelings sprout and grow-and feelings are all that matters, as far as I'm concerned. Is a feeling anything but an entire world poured into a thought?
Honoré de Balzac
Everyone is wrong about the future.
Milan Kundera
In the final analysis, with Rene she had been an apprentice to love, she had loved him only to learn how to give herself, enslaved and surfeited, to Sir Stephen.
Pauline Réage
Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.
Roland Barthes
The rain is, in a sense, The sole sad friend of those who find themselvesThinking, wide awake, until the dawn,Who, in bed, alone, with fevered hands, Listen to it, soothed. They like the companyOf its faint moan across the sleeping plain,Its rustling in the garden all night
Alain-Fournier
As long as ignorance and misery exist in the world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless
Victor Hugo
For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God.
Alexandre Dumas
Custom is second nature and no less powerful.
Michel Eyquem Montaigne
If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.
Anatole France
Hardly anyone knows how much is gained by ignoring the future.
Bernard de Fontenelle
A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the
Victor Hugo
Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.
Honoré de Balzac
All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.'I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
Hippolyte Taine
Look, look,' cried the count, seizing the young man's hands - "look, for on my soul it is curious. Here is a man who had resigned himself to his fate, who was going to the scaffold to die - like a coward, it is true, but he was about to die without resistance. Do you know what gave him strength? - do you know what consoled him? It was, that another partook of his punishment - that another partook of his anguish - that another was to die before him. Lead two sheep to the butcher's, two oxen to the slaughterhouse, and make one of them understand that his companion will not die; the sheep will bleat for pleasure, the ox will bellow with joy. But man - man, who God created in his own image - man, upon whom God has laid his first, his sole commandment, to love his neighbour - man, to whom God has given a voice to express his thoughts - what is his first cry when he hears his fellowman is saved? A blasphemy. Honour to man, this masterpiece of nature, this king of the creation!
Alexandre Dumas
What would be the description of happines? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.
André Gide
In the heat of the battle, all internal barriers break down; the puppet bourgeoisie of businessmen and shopkeepers, the urban proletariat, which is always in a privileged position, the lumpen-proletariat of the shanty towns - all fall into line with the stand made by the rural masses, that veritable reservoir of a national revolutionary army; for in those countries where colonialism has deliberately held up development, the peasantry, when it rises, quickly stands out as the revolutionary class. For it knows naked oppression, and suffers far more from it than the workers in the towns, and in order not to die of hunger, it demands no less than a complete demolishing of all existing structures. In order to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist
Jean-Paul Sarte
Jesus the very thought of TheeWith sweetness fills my breast;But sweeter far Thy face to see,And in Thy presence rest.
Bernard of Clairvaux
Twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.
Jean Baudrillard
And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Of course, even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they understood it somewhat differently: it was considered a simple absence of knowledge, a defect correctable by education. In Flaubert's novels, stupidity is an inseparable dimension of human existence. It accompanies poor Emma throughout her days, to her bed of love and to her deathbed, over which two deadly agélastes, Homais and Bournisien, go on endlessly trading their inanities like a kind of funeral oration. But the most shocking, the most scandalous thing about Flaubert's vision of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress!
Milan Kundera
The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.
Simone de Beauvoir
Though the ancient poet in Plutarch tells us we must not trouble the gods with our affairs because they take no heed of our angers and disputes, we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.
Michel de Montaigne
It is the same in love as in war a fortress that parleys is half taken.
Marguerite de Valois
I leave before being left. I decide.
Brigitte Bardot
And yet, because I am without a doubt mortal, I have the troubling desire to do good, to please, to communicate my warmth, to still be very beautiful sometimes to inspire a taste for beauty. I know that these times are not fertile in grace...I am afraid tomorrow the grace of woman...may be recognized as a public utility & be socialized to the point of becoming a banal article, a bazaar object like in '93 & that one will find types of tender or amusing women with millions of copies like the creations of the big...fashion stores where it is always the same thing. I want to affirm the superiority of the god over that of the organizer of concerts for the poor.
Rachilde
To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.
Marquis de Sade
I am not always just living, just following all my fantasies; I come up for air, for understanding.
Anaïs Nin
Darling, has not the count just told us that all human wisdom is summed up in two words? Wait and hope.
Alexandre Dumas
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others by means of love friendship indignation and compassion.
Simone de Beauvoir
A beautiful dress may look beautiful on a hanger, but that means nothing. It must be seen on the shoulders, with the movement of the arms, the legs, and the waist.
Coco Chanel
The way you react to challenging situations will say a lot about you. Actually, it will make or break your business.
Cendrine Marrouat
Every page should explode, either because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography.
Tristan Tzara
Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.
Marquis de Sade
Love of justice is for most men only the courage to suffer injustice.
Comte de Lautréamont
Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.
Arthur Rimbaud
We shall never arrive at true meekness by any other way than by humiliating ourselves and by honoring others from the depth of our hearts.
John Calvin
God instituted prayer to communicate to creatures the dignity of causality.
Blaise Pascal
And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.
Albert Camus
Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.
Marcel Marceau
Our life is a journey, through winter and night, We look for our way, in a sky without light. (Song of the Swiss Guards, 1793)
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory and in creative action that man finds his supreme joy.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Why only one song, one speech, one text at a time?" - "When Our Lips Speak Together
Luce Irigaray
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I don't know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I'm some kind of a Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.
Henri Matisse