Quotes by French Authors - Page 81

Our children start out as good readers and will remain so if the adults around them nourish their enthusiasm instead of trying to prove themselves. If we stimulate their desire to learn before making them recite out loud; if we support them in their efforts instead of trying to catch them out; if we give up whole evenings instead of trying to save time; if we make the present come alive without threatening them with the future; if we refuse to turn pleasure into a chore but nurture it instead. If we do all this, we ourselves will rediscover the pleasure of giving freely-- because all cultural apprenticeship is free.
Daniel Pennac
In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.
Albert Camus
Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.
La Rochefoucauld
The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate bondage, and the meanest and most servile preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principle put themselves forward as the apostles of civilization and intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where all things are out of their natural connections, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?
Alexis de Tocqueville
To have an independant mind, to think for oneself, not to follow fashion, not to seek honour or decoration, not to become part of the establishment
Marcel Schlumberge
Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.
Paul Lafargue
One discovers that destiny can be diverted, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. Once the deforming mirror has been smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness. There is a possibility of joy.
Anaïs Nin
We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
Milan Kundera
Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered it is something moulded.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
Albert Camus
He hesitated till the last moment, but finally dropped them in the box, saying, "I shall win!"--the cry of a gambler, the cry of the great general, the compulsive cry that has ruined more men than it has ever saved.
Honoré de Balzac
The more you say the less people remember. The fewer the words the greater the profit.
François Fénelon
I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
Anaïs Nin
Live now believe me wait not till tomorrow gather the roses of life today.
Pierre de Ronsard
The logic of the heart is absurd.
Julie de Lespinasse
She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.
Gustave Flaubert
It is precisely when their interior worlds change shape that Bezukhov and Bolkonsky are confirmed as individuals; that they surprise; that they make themselves different; that their freedom catches fire, and with it the identity of their selves; these are moments of poetry: they experience them with such intensity that the whole world rushes forward to meet them with an intoxicating parade of wondrous details. In Tolstoy, man is the more himself, the more an individual, when he has the strength, the imagination, the intelligence, to transform himself.By contrast, the people I see changing their attitude toward Lenin, Europe, and so on expose their nonindividuality. This change is neither their own creation nor their own invention, not caprice or surprise or thought or madness; it has no poetry; it is nothing but a very prosaic adjustment to the changing spirit of History. That is why they don't even notice it; in the final analysis, they always stay the same: always in the right, always thinking what, in their milieu, a person is supposed to think; they change not in order to draw closer to some essential self but in order to merge with everyone else; changing lets them stay unchanged.Another way of expressing it: they change their mind in accordance with the invisible tribunal that is also changing its mind; their change is thus simply a bet on what the tribunal will proclaim to be the truth tomorrow.
Milan Kundera
The world out there is nothing more than a load of places with people in ’em. And the people out there are neither more interesting, nor better, nor lower, than us here in Angle Tar. It’s humans, Rue. We’re the same wherever you go, no matter what we surround ourselves with.
Laure Eve
I assert nothing, I content myself with believing that more is possible than people think.
Voltaire
Truth to tell, the longer I live, the more I'm tempted to think that the only moderately worthwhile people in the world are you and I.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
The best way to keep your friends is to never owe them anything and never lend them anything.
Paul de Kock
It is our harsh fate on earth that body and soul should be so closely bound together; that the soul should have to drag the body along, should be exposed to its vicissitudes, should even respond to them. This primal curse has always weighed heavily upon us; but how much more heavily under a religious law which compels us to endure this outrageous condition; which will not permit our honor, when it is imperiled, to save itself by casting aside the body, and seeking refuge in the world of the spirit!
Jules Michelet
Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom—ah the soul-destroying boredom—of long days of mild content.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Nice is a city of ghosts and specters, but I hope not to become one of them right away.
Patrick Modiano
He looked at Hector's list and told him that, thanks to a lot of studies and calculations, they'd shown that if you compared yourself to others and didn't find yourself wanting, if you had no money or health problems, if you had friends, a close-knit family, a job you liked, if you were religious and practised your religion, if you felt useful, if you went for a little stroll from time to time, and all of this in a country that was run by not very bad people, where you were taken care of when things went wrong, your chances of bring happy were greatly increased.
François Lelord
Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.
Maximilien de Robespierre
No love no friendship can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.
François Mauriac
We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening. The truth which one puts into one's words does not carve out a direct path for itself, it is not irresistibly self-evident. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take shape in them.
Marcel Proust
An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.
Stendhal
Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one...
Anaïs Nin
If there was a party, everyone in turn would come sit next to me to regale me with how he or sh thought I should live and what I deserved to have. What it boiled down to was that I should live like them. Elvire, one half of a tightly knit couple would forget that her husband was clinically depressed. Guillaume, married to a harpy, maintained that if one laid low and said amen to everything, things worked out. Maria, fed up to the teeth with her children, wanted me to have my own. Assia loved women but it was killing her mother. Patrizio had bruises on his shoulders from his chronically jealous wife. Not one of them could stand my singleness, because it could have been theirs.
Sophie Fontanel
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
Roland Barthes
For instance, a fireman is a brave fellow! He fears nothing, least ofall fire! Well, the fireman in question, who had gone to make a roundof inspection in the cellars and who, it seems, had ventured a littlefarther than usual, suddenly reappeared on the stage, pale, scared,trembling, with his eyes starting out of his head, and practicallyfainted in the arms of the proud mother of little Jammes.[1] And why?Because he had seen coming toward him, AT THE LEVEL OF HIS HEAD, BUTWITHOUT A BODY ATTACHED TO IT, A HEAD OF FIRE! And, as I said, afireman is not afraid of fire.The fireman's name was Pampin.
Gaston Leroux
Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to man's awareness of it.
Albert Camus
Occasionally I looked up towards some vast old apartment with its shutters still open and where amphibious men and women, adapting themselves each evening to living in an element different from their daytime one, swam about slowly in the dense liquid which at nightfall rises incessantly from the wells of lamps and fills the rooms to the brink of their walls of stone and glass, and as they moved about in it, their bodies sent forth unctuous golden ripples.
Marcel Proust
Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.
Michel Foucault
The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness.
Victor Hugo
He who has rejected his demons badgers us to death with his angels
Henri Michaux
Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.
Charles Baudelaire
Beware of allowing a tactless word rebuttal a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.
Anaïs Nin
What we are able to say about our intimate relation with a book will have more force if we have not thought about it excessively. Instead, we need only let our unconscious express itself within us and give voice, in this privileged moment of openness in language, to the secret ties that bind us to the book, and therefore to ourselves.
Pierre Bayard
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
Milan Kundera
A named thing is a tamed thing.
Joanne Harris
That he had no scruples; for, said he, when I fail in my duty, I readily acknowledge it, saying, I am used to do so: I shall never do otherwise, if I am left to myself. If I fail not, then I give GOD thanks, acknowledging that it comes from Him.
Brother Lawrence
All the great pleasures in life are silent.
Georges Clémenceau
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.
Jean-Paul Sartre
He did not seek to efface pain in forgetfulness, he sought to elevate it and to dignify it with hope. He would say, "Be careful how you turn to the dead. Don't think of the rotting. Hold your gaze and you will see the living light of your dearly loved departed up above in heaven.
Victor Hugo
Providence has given us hope and sleep as a compensation for the many cares of life.
Voltaire
Happiness thinks only of itself.
Raymond Radiguet
The imagination is always more horrible than the truth.
Hervé Guibert
Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.
Marquis de Sade
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.
Victor Hugo
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.
Simone de Beauvoir
And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!
Charles Baudelaire
[I]t is not by being richer or more powerful that a man becomes better; one is a matter of fortune, the other of virtue. Nor should she deem herself other than venal who weds a rich man rather than a poor, and desires more things in her husband than himself. Assuredly, whomsoever this concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection.
Héloïse d'Argenteuil
Of all our infirmities the most savage is to despise our being.
Michel de Montaigne
France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war
Charles de Gaulle
Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.
Yves Saint-Laurent
People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things – even tragedy – with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death.
Michel Houellebecq