Quotes by French Authors - Page 82

People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad.
François de La Rochefoucauld
I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.
Julio Cortázar
At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.
Simone de Beauvoir
Those intellectuals are our natural enemies; the only kind who are worth anything are the musicians and the dancers: they don’t insult anybody with their performances, and they neither sing nor dance politics. So I like them; but don’t let me hear a word about the rest
Alfred de Vigny
The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.
Guy de Maupassant
At last I perceive that in revolutions the supreme power finally rests with the most abandoned.
Georges Jacques Danton
Women always have some mental reservation.
Louis Ferdinand Destouches
Hell madame is to love no longer.
Georges Bernanos
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
Albert Camus
Hortense was a wife; Valerie a mistress.Many men desire to have these two editions of the same work, although it is proof of deep inferiority in a man if he cannot make his wife his mistress. Seeking variety is a sign of impotence.
Honoré de Balzac
Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.
Victor Hugo
That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Depot, the barracks, the camps, History, time-everything that defiles and destroys you-have been able to take away from her.
Patrick Modiano
It is always thus impaled by a state of mind which is destined not to last that we make our irrevocable decisions.
Marcel Proust
For a few seconds Maria did not move, or even breathe, apparently. Then she gave a sorrowful gulp and, like all little girls, even those who speak to fantastical wild boars and mercurial horses, she collapsed in desperate sobs, of the kind that come so easily to a twelve-year-old, and so hard to a person of forty.
Muriel Barbery
A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.
Charles Baudelaire
Daylight does not lend itself to terror: objects and people are plain to see; and we encounter there only those things which dare to show themselves in the glare of day. But night, opaque night denser than walls, night, empty and infinite and so black and fathomless that terrifying things reach out and touch us, night when we feel horror stirring, mysteriously prowling―night seemed to him to hide some unknown, imminent, threatening danger. What could it be?
Guy de Maupassant
- Is it their fault if they think that it’s good to work?- No, said Colin, it’s not their fault. It’s because they’ve been told : work is sacred, it’s good, it’s nice, it’s what counts before anything, and only those who work have the right to everything. The only thing is, it’s been set up so that they work all the time so they can’t take advantage of it.- But then they’re stupid, said Chloe.- Yes, they’re stupid, said Colin. That’s why they agree with those that made them believe that work is the best thing there is. That saves them from thinking and finding a way to progress and to no longer work.
Boris Vian
Much blood has been spilled over words, and a great deal of it over the word ‘God.’ (125)
Jean-Yves Leloup
Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.
Gilles Deleuze
... since I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the variable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated and formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate object with which one seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the uneasiness which, in anticipation, one then feels. Hardly even does one think of oneself, but only how to escape from oneself.
Marcel Proust
I never rebel so much against France as not to regard Paris with a friendly eye; she has had my heart since my childhood.... I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am French only by this great city: the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world.
Michel de Montaigne
People are forever finding something wrong with you.
Brigitte Bardot
They were so absorbed in their plotting that they did not hear Boule de Suif return. But the Comte's whispered 'shh!' made them all look up. There she was. A sudden silence fell, and at first a feeling of embarrassment prevented them from speaking to her. At last, however, the Comtesse, more of an adept than the rest in social duplicity, asked her: 'Did you enjoy the christening?
Guy de Maupassant
Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.
Pascal
If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody comes to kill your wife and your children, but also nobody comes to ask you to kill the wives and children of others, then render thanks to God and go in peace. But always keep this thought in mind: you might be luckier than I, but you’re not a better person.
Jonathan Littell
Il ne fait aucun doute pour moi que la sagesse est le but principal de la vie et c'est pourquoi je reviens toujours aux stoïciens. Ils ont atteint la sagesse, on ne peut donc plus les appeler des philosophes au sens propre du terme. De mon point de vue, la sagesse est le terme naturel de la philosophie, sa fin dans les deux sens du mot. Une philosophie finit en sagesse et par là même disparaît.
Emil M. Cioran
A single idea if it is right saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.
Jacques Maritain
Having recovered from an inexplicable moment of weakness Claire was on the defensive, ready to bite. I had the impression that she was now looking for a chance to demonstrate her strength, or her hard-heartedness.
Jean de Berg
But this aura of an artificial menace was still necessary to conceal that they [Presidents] were no longer anything but the mannequins of power. Formerly, the king (also the god) had to die, therein lay his power. Today, he is miserably forced to feign death, in order to preserve the blessing of power. But it is lost.
Jean Baudrillard
Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
Voltaire
We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us
André Gide
Rather than allowing a book's intelligence to speak through our mouths, we replace it with our own intelligence as we talk about it. Rather than acting as emissary for the book, we become guardians of the temple, boasting of its wonders in the very words that slam shut it's doors: Reading matters! Reading matters!
Daniel Pennac
If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...?
Blaise Pascal
When all hope is lost, remember that light can be found even in the deepest of oceans.
G.C. Julien
We were created to look at one another, weren't we
Edgar Degas
Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him.
Charles Fourier
When one is pretending the entire body revolts.
Anaïs Nin
There are very few human beings who receive the truth complete and staggering by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment on a small scale by successive developments cellularly like a laborious mosaic.
Anaïs Nin
Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
Albert Camus
Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body’s breath, and the strings’ wails and moans are echoes of the body’s music. It is the body’s vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.
Anaïs Nin
If you ask me what I came to do in this world I an artist I will answer you: T am here to live out loud.'
Émile Zola
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occa
Albert Camus
If Cupid misses the heart, he touches the body fatally. (Si Cupidon rate le cœur, - Il touche mortellement le corps)
Charles de Leusse
We work not only to produce but to give value to time.
Eugène Delacroix
The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike.
Colette
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Albert Camus
But what then? What had he really gained by all this trouble? What had he brought back from this long and weary journey? Nothing, say you? Perhaps so;...Truly, would you not for less than that go around the world?
Jules Verne
To dream! Such dreams certainly make life more worth living... and only dreams can do that for me.
Jean Lorrain
You are beautiful, but you are empty. One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you --- the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars; because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or bloated, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
He wanted to know all about me and my family and especially my childhood.'That's where everything starts', he'd say. 'Both heaven and hell.
Céleste Albaret
Hélène slowly surveyed the room. In this respectable society, amongst these apparently decent middle-class people, were there none but faithless wives? With her strict provincial morality, she was amazed at the licensed promiscuity of Parisian life.
Émile Zola
She is not my mistress,' replied the young sailor gravely, ‘she is my betrothed.’'Sometimes one and the same thing,' said Morrel, with a smile.'Not with us, sir,' replied Dantes.
Alexandre Dumas
During these past years, not being able to speak with you, I dedicated myself to reviewing, within myself, the sacred books I know by heart. I had the idea I should summarize them in a single volume. Then, in a single chapter, then in a single page, and finally in a single sentence. This sentence is the greatest thing I can teach you. It seems simple, but if you understand it, you will never have to study again." The Rabbi recited it. And life, from that moment on, changed for Alejandro. "If God is not here, He is nowhere; this instant itself is perfection.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
No one is responsible for what he is nor even for what he does. This is obvious and everyone more or less agrees that it is so. Then why celebrate or denigrate? Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.
Emil M. Cioran
The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.
Victor Hugo
For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits.
Marcel Proust
When no possessions keep us, when no countries contain us, and no time detains us, man becomes a heroic wanderer, and woman, a wanderess.
Roman Payne
The stars are beautiful, because of a flower that cannot be seen... The desert is beautiful," the little prince added. And that was true. I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams... "What makes the desert beautiful," said the little prince, "is that somewhere it hides a well..." I was astonished by a sudden understanding of that mysterious radiation of the sands.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
That it was no doubt a dark hour, but that he should get through it; that after all he held his destiny, evil as it might be, in his own hand; that he was master of it. He clung to that thought.
Victor Hugo