Quotes by French Authors - Page 77

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.", 1964)
Colette
We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our school masters, and one from the world. The third contradicts all that the first two teach us.
Montesquieu
He who spends too long regretting his ruined crop will be neglect to plant next year's harvest.
François Lelord
God teaches the soul by pains and obstacles, not by ideas.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade
He does not call those who are worthy, but those whom He will.
Therese of Lisieux
Most people, when they move, well they just move depending on whatever's around them. At this very moment, as I am writing, Constitution the cat is going by with her tummy dragging close to the floor. This cat has absolutely nothing constructive to do in life and still she is heading toward something, probably an armchair.
Muriel Barbery
Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.
Albert Schweitzer
At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thoughts are outside language, they are unformulable, although they are perfectly rigorous and clear and although every one of the relations they involve is capable of precise expression in words. So the mind moves in a closed space of partial truth, which may be larger or smaller, without ever being able so much as to glance at what is outside.
Simone Weil
You are very harsh.''I have seen the world.
Voltaire
Zhuang Zhu also meant that the feet as such are small pieces of space, but their vocation (‘walking’) is to articulate the world’s space. The size of the foot, the gap between the legs, have no role, are never lined up anywhere. But they measure all the rest. Our feet form a compass that has no useful function, apart from evaluating distance. The legs survey. Their stride constitutes a serviceable measurement.
Frédéric Gros
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.
Albert Camus
Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.
Jean Baudrillard
Without seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible, he gazed upon it. He did not study God; he was dazzled by Him.
Victor Hugo
Le souvenir n'est qu'un regard posé de temps en temps sur des êtres devenus intérieurs,mais qui ne dépendent pas de la mémoire pour continuer d'exister.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Here, the mother country is satisfied to keep some feudal rulers in her pay; there, dividing and ruling she has created a native bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end; elsewhere she has played a double game: the colony is planted with settlers and exploited at the same time. Thus Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing groups, has fashioned classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavoured by every means to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonised societies. Fanon hides nothing: in order to fight against us the former colony must fight against itself: or, rather, the two struggles form part of a whole.
Jean-Paul Sarte
The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.
André Gide
Oh! Let us never never doubt What nobody is sure about.
Hilaire Belloc
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep
Albert Camus
One third of our life is spent in sleep. It is consolation for the troubles of our waking hours or atonement for their pleasures; but I have never experienced sleep to be mere repose. After a few minutes' lethargy, a new life begins, untrammeled by the limitations of time and space, and undoubtedly similar to that which awaits us after death...
Gérard de Nerval
As a child, at the age when others promise to be Chateaubriand or nothing, I had written that I would be myself or nothing. I had certainly not foreseen that one day I would find myself in the position of being both myself and nothing. 65
Marcel Benabou
The Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.
Michel Houellebecq
The best vaccine against anger is to watch others in its throes.
Marcel Proust
The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality
Roger Caillois
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
Victor Hugo
I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down." -Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 76
Milan Kundera
My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
Gustave Flaubert
I remembered the fox. One runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Morality is everywhere the same for all men, therefore it comes from God; sects differ, therefore they are the work of men.
Voltaire
I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there's nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear. Dying, we may already be dead, but we never die, that moment never comes, or rather it never stops coming, there it is, it's coming, and then it's still coming, and then it's already over, without ever having come.
Jonathan Littell
People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.
Albert Camus
She had accepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness. He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
Albert Camus
The man who says his prayers in the evening is a captain posting his sentries. After that he can sleep.
Charles Baudelaire
If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.
Albert Camus
He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why.
Marguerite Duras
I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essentially human, not intellectual. I do not understand abstract act. Only art born of love, passion, pain.
Anaïs Nin
The human mind is a lucky little local, passing accident which was totally unforeseen, and condemned to disappear with this earth and to recommence perhaps here or elsewhere the same or different with fresh combinations of eternally new beginnings. We owe it to this little lapse of intelligence on His part that we are very uncomfortable in this world which was not made for us, which had not been prepared to receive us, to lodge and feed us or to satisfy reflecting beings, and we owe it to Him also that we have to struggle without ceasing against what are still called the designs of Providence, when we are really refined and civilized beings.
Guy de Maupassant
Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
Stendhal
The heart of a statesman should be in his head.
Napoléon Bonaparte
There were some that were of so rare a beauty that my pleasure on catching sight of them was enhanced by surprise. By what privilege, on one morning rather than another, did the window on being uncurtained disclose to my wondering eyes the nymph Glauconome, whose lazy beauty, gently breathing, had the transparence of a vaporous emerald beneath whose surface I could see teeming the ponderable elements that coloured it? She made the sun join in her play, with a smile rendered languorous by an invisible haze which was nought but a space kept vacant about her translucent surface, which, thus curtailed, became more appealing, like those goddesses whom the sculptor carves in relief upon a block of marble, the rest of which he leaves unchiselled. So, in her matchless colour, she invited us out over those rough terrestrial roads, from which, seated beside Mme. de Villeparisis in her barouche, we should see, all day long and without ever reaching it, the coolness of her gentle palpitation.
Marcel Proust
It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at present.
Émile Durkheim
In medical science, as in daily life, it was unwise to jump to conclusions
Albert Camus
Half the world does not know how the other half lives.
François Rabelais
I need nothing but God and to lose myself in the heart of God.
Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque
To the rich, therefore, falls the burden of Beauty. And if they cannot assume it, then they deserve to die.
Muriel Barbery
Of course the people in the metro didn't see a thing!...what a joke! petrified ratlets! but they'll still come out to refute me! make claims!...that nothing got bombed!...squished! powdered! that the firmament was calm, and me, I imagined the whole thing! chrysanthemums, sprays, roses! why, there's no more any such thing as sky-hooking shrapnel than there is anal ice cream! it's all in my mind! hallucinations and bullshit! what a crook! but I repeat and reassert! shrapnel and fiery lace stretched from one end of the horizon to the other! with lots of glow-worms mixed in...and dancing purple fireflies...
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Eugène Delacroix
But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart.
Gustave Flaubert
An error of the passions is not the flowering of a great love, and merely the beauty of the human form is not capable of inspiring an eternity of mad attachment.
Rachilde
Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness.
George Sand
If I had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: "I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.
Albert Camus
If no one loved, the sun would go out.
Victor Hugo
La vie se joue souvent en deux manches: dans un premier temps, elle t'endort en te faisant croire que tu gères, et sur la deuxième partie, quand elle te voit détendu et désarmé, elle repasse les plats et te défonce.
Virginie Despentes
Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it.
Maurice Chevalier
Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
Milan Kundera
To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.
Napoléon Bonaparte
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labour and there is an invisible labour.
Victor Hugo
Beauty is unbearable drives us to despair offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
Albert Camus
Better is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.
Georges Bernanos