Quotes by French Authors - Page 83

Never had she let herself go in this way with another body, and never had another body let itself go with her in this way. Her lover could play with her belly, but he had never lived in there; he could touch her breast, but he never drunk from it.
Milan Kundera
Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.
Albert Schweitzer
I would advocate that chocolate be covered by health insurance, but that is admittedly a very French public policy perspective.
Mireille Guiliano
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
Anaïs Nin
There is no man...however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man...
Marcel Proust
There is no knowing that does not begin with knowing God.
John Calvin
Intuition is given only to him who has undergone long preparation to receive it.
Louis Pasteur
The best religion or practice is the one that makes us better. (42)
Jean-Yves Leloup
A book is like a large cemetery upon whose tombs one can no longer read the effaced names. On the other hand, sometimes one remembers well the name, without knowing if anything of the being, whose name it was, survives in these pages.
Marcel Proust
Moreover it is easier, in the informality of conversation, to achieve that excitement and incoherence which is the true eloquence of love.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called 'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own.
Marcel Proust
Success generally depends upon knowing how long it takes to succeed.
Charles de Montesquieu
All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal
How well I know you by your deeds and how invariably you succeed in living down to what one expects of you!
Alexandre Dumas
There is do much sttuborn hope in a human heart.
Albert Camus
He made what apology he could and hurried home, overjoyed that the satisfaction of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having feigned for so long, when in Odette's company, a sort of indifference, he had not now, by a demonstration of jealousy, given her that proof of the excess of his own passion which, in a pair of lovers, fully and finally dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love the other enough. He never spoke to her of this misadventure, he cased even to think of it himself. But now and then his thoughts in their wandering course would come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would startle it into life, thrust it more deeply down into his consciousness, and leave him aching with a sharp, far-rooted pain.
Marcel Proust
...men are as vulnerable to joy as they are to suffering.
Michel Bernanos
You seem to know a lot about it," she said. "And you do subtleties.""Yeah. Like I've always wanted to destroy the Nine Worlds while committing suicide.""Well, there's no need to be rude," protested Sif.
Joanne Harris
Vilify! Vilify! Some of it will always stick.
Pierre Beaumarchais
I may be a little like the grown-ups. I must have grown old.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I'm struck by the difficulty I had in formulating it. When I think back now, I ask myself what else it was that I was talking about in Madness and Civilization or The Birth of the Clinic, but power? Yet I'm perfectly aware that I scarcely ever used the word and never had such a field of analyses at my disposal. I can say that this was an incapacity linked undoubtedly with the political situation in which we found ourselves. It is hard to see where, either on the Right or the Left, this problem of power could then have been posed. On the Right, it was posed only in terms of constitution, sovereignty, and so on, that is, in juridical terms; on the Marxist side, it was posed only in terms of the state apparatus. The way power was exercised - concretely, and in detail - with its specificity, its techniques and tactics, was something no one attempted to ascertain; they contented themselves with denouncing it in a polemical and global fashion as it existed among the "other," in the adversary camp. Where Soviet socialist power was in question, its opponents called it totalitarianism; power in Western capitalism was denounced by the Marxists as class domination; but the mechanics of power in themselves were never analyzed.
Michel Foucault
The City is free of sinThe snow has given it absolution A man who slips A horse that fallsOh no, the city is in a nightgown
Pierre Albert-Birot
It is only on the basis of the probable and the apparent that men bereft of a sixth sense are able to sit in judgment over other men.
Petrus Borel
I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.
Gustave Flaubert
What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork.
Irène Némirovsky
I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.
Anaïs Nin
Nature alone can speak to our intelligence an imperishable language, never changing, because it remains within the bounds of eternal truth and of what is absolutely noble and beautiful.
George Sand
Perhaps I should explain to him that it has been my particular way of frustrating time's attrition, postponing death and sustaining the illusion that one can always erase everything and make a fresh start.
Nathacha Appanah
At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring in fits and starts.
Marcel Proust
Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,Your mother, your sister, or your brother?I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.Your friends?Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.Your country?I do not know in what latitude it lies.Beauty?I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.Gold?I hate it as you hate God.Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?I love the clouds the clouds that pass up thereUp there the wonderful clouds!
Charles Baudelaire
The water shines only by the sun. And it is you who are my sun. (L'eau ne brille que par le soleil. - Et c’est toi qui es mon soleil.)
Charles de Leusse
Madame Altamont was leaving for a holiday. With her characteristic concern for propriety and orderliness, she emptied her refrigerator and gave the left-overs to the concierge: two ounces of butter, a pound of fresh green beans, two lemons, half a pot of redcurrant jam, a dab of fresh cream, a few cherries, a port of milk, a few bits of cheese, various herbs, and three Bulgarian-flavour yoghurts.
Georges Perec
There are moments when a rope's end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit.
Victor Hugo
Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.
Victor Hugo
This sense of my own weakness and emptiness comforts me. I feel myself a mere speck of dust lost in space, yet I am part of that endless grandeur which envelopes me. I could never see why that should be cause for despair, since there could very well be nothing at all behind the black curtain.
Gustave Flaubert
During several centuries Clochemerle, far from the cities and trade routes, had lived in stillness and isolation. But now, at last, the clamour of the great world was crossing the invisible barrier, bringing doubts, temptations, and discontents.
Gabriel Chevallier
A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.
André Maurois
I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.
Anaïs Nin
The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.
Gustave Flaubert
Our perception of happiness is determined by what we experience.
Julie Maroh
Lastly, and doubtless always, but particularly at the end of the last century, certain scholars considered that since the appearances on our scale were finally the only important ones for us, there was no point in seeking what might exist in an inaccessible domain. I find it very difficult to understand this point of view since what is inaccessible today may become accessible tomorrow (as has happened by the invention of the microscope), and also because coherent assumptions on what is still invisible may increase our understanding of the visible.
Jean Baptiste Perrin
An acceptable death is a death which can be accepted or tolerated by the survivors. It has its antithesis: ‘the embarrassingly graceless dying,’ which embarrasses the survivors because it causes too strong an emotion to burst forth; and emotions must be avoided both in the hospital and everywhere in society. One does not have the right to become emotional other than in private, that is to say, secretly.
Philippe Ariès
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
Marcel Proust
In England there are sixty different religions and only one sauce.
Marquis Caraccioli
We undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits their sickness and their health.
Michel de Montaigne
Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?
Gustave Flaubert
Heureux sont ceux qui peuvent aimer et haïr sans feinte, sans détour, sans nuance.
Irène Némirovsky
Men know the damage a few words can do to girls’ hearts, and, idiots that we are, we swoon away and fall into the trap, excited because at last a man has set one for us
Grégoire Delacourt
And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
Gustave Flaubert
In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her. And 50, at an age when it would appear - since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective pleasure - that the taste for feminine beauty must play the larger part in its procreation, love may come into being, love of the most physical order, without any foundation in desire. At this time of life a man has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before his passive and astonished heart. We come to its aid; we falsify it by memory and by suggestion; recognising one of its symptoms we recall and recreate the rest.
Marcel Proust
Il faut que l’homme s’évade de cette lice ridicule qu’on lui a faite: le prétendu réel actuel avec la perspective d’un réel futur qui ne vaille guère mieux. Chaque minute pleine porte en elle-même la négation de siècles d’histoire boitillante et cassée. Ceux à qui il appartient de faire virevolter ces huit flamboyants au-dessus de nous ne le pourront qu’avec de la sève pure._ Manifestes du surréalisme
André Breton
The beautiful must be incongruous.
Julien Torma
He who complains sins.
Saint Francis de Sales
Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Yvan's a very tolerant bloke, which of course, when it comes to relationships, is the worst thing you can be. Yvan's very tolerant because he couldn't care less.
Yasmina Reza
To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!
Victor Hugo
The effort of explaining, even of expressing himself, had become, with the years, more and more terrifying to him. Whether from laziness or from inability to find the right words, he had developed almost a passion for silence.
François Mauriac
Uncertainty is a quality to be cherished, therefore – if not for it, who would dare to undertake anything?
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
When you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive
Anaïs Nin