Quotes by French Authors - Page 89

The master always keeps a piece of learning--that is to say, a piece of the student's ignorance--up his sleeve. I understood that, says the satisfied student. You think so, corrects the master. in fact, there's a difficulty here that I've been sparing you until now. We will explain it when we get to the corresponding lesson. What does this mean? asks the curious student. I could tell you, responds the master, but it would be premature: you wouldn't understand at all. It will be explained to you next year. The master is always a length ahead of the student, who always feels that in order to go farther he must have another master, supplementary explications. Thus does the triumphant Achilles drag Hector's corpse, attached to his chariot, around the city of Troy.
Jacques Rancière
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
Honoré de Balzac
Paradise does not exist, but we must nonetheless strive to be worthy of it.
Jules Renard
Ability is of little account without opportunity.
Napoléon Bonaparte
We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.
Anaïs Nin
There are pieces of you that will always be with me.
Nicole Garcia
Prosperity of wicked men runs like a torrent past, and soon is spent.
Marcel Proust
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
Émile Zola
Audacity has made kings.
Prosper Jolyot de Crebillion
To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.
Charles Baudelaire
How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is.
Charles Baudelaire
Do you know why our poetry today and especially our philosophy are such dead issues? Because they've cut themselves off from life. Now, Greece idealized on life's own level: an artist's life was already a poetic achievement; a philosopher's life was an enactment of his philosophy; and when they were a part of life that way, instead of ignoring each other, philosophy could nourish poetry, poetry express philosophy, and together achieve an admirable persuasiveness. Today beauty no longer acts; and action no longer bothers about being beautiful; and wisdom operates on the sidelines.
André Gide
Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.
Victor Hugo
Athos was delighted to find he was going to fight an Englishman. We might say that was his dream.
Alexandre Dumas
Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.
Milan Kundera
Fashion changes, but style endures.
Coco Chanel
Nothing is owed to us in life, not even the innocence of a blue sky. Great art is the art of thankfulness for the abundance of every moment. Writing is a Chinese variant of this thankfulness, a courtesy to life in its cloak of nothing, lined with love.
Christian Bobin
Words are the source of misunderstandings.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
There is a time for work, and a time for love. That leaves no other time.
Coco Chanel
He was Antinous, wild. You would have said, seeing the thoughtful reflection of his eye, that he had already, in some preceding existence, been through the revolutionary apocalypse. He knew its tradition like an eyewitness. He knew every little detail of that great thing.A pontifical and warrior nature, strange in a youth. He was officiating and militant; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of democracy; above the movement of the time, a priest of the ideal.
Victor Hugo
I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
It is not in novelty but in habit that we find the greatest pleasure.
Raymond Radiguet
Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.
André Maurois
on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
Jean Genet
What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born. Her face, at once innocent and feral, soft and wild! Her mouth voluptuous. Eyes deep as oceans, her eyes as wide as planets. I likened her to the slender Psyché and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: the dusty hems of her bunched-up skirt, the worn straps of her nightshirt; the blackened soles of her tiny bare feet, the coal-stained balcony bricks upon which she sat, and that dusty wrought-ironwork that framed her perch. All this and the pungent air!—almost foul, with so many odors. Ô, that and the spicy night! …Pungency, spice, filth and night, dust and light; all things dark did blossom in sight; flower and bloom, the night has its pearl too—the moon! And once a month it will make the face of this tender girl bloom.
Roman Payne
The continuous work of our life,” says Montaigne, “is to build death.” He quotes the Latin poets: Prima, quae vitam dedit, hora corpsit. And again: Nascentes morimur. Man knows and thinks this tragic ambivalence which the animal and the plant merely undergo. A new paradox is thereby introduced into his destiny. “Rational animal,” “thinking reed,” he escapes from his natural condition without, however, freeing himself from it. He is still a part of this world of which he is a consciousness. He asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things. At every moment he can grasp the non-temporal truth of his existence. But between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when he exists is nothing. This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends.
Simone de Beauvoir
What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.
Albert Camus
Only those with no memory insist on their originality.
Coco Chanel
When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties.
Marquis De Lafayette
I never sleep in comfort save when I am hearing a sermon or praying to God.
François Rabelais
And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person's eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors.
Milan Kundera
We ought to be much more fearful of what we don’t know. We should really be fearful of an unconscious that inhabits us, that guides us, that influences our life and of which we don’t know the face and don’t know the message. Actually I have much less fear since I confronted fears. What’s frightening to me is people whose unconscious leads them, destroys them, and yet they will never stop and look at it. That’s the minotaur in the labyrinth, which many people never come face to face with. There was a very remarkable percussion composer, Edgar Varese, who always mocked psychology, mocked psychoanalysis, mocked psychiatry. He was satirical about it, wouldn’t have any of it. And yet his whole life pattern was self-destructive. He was an innovator and a tremendous musician. But he blocked himself. His biography is out now, and you can see the pattern. You can see this demon that was driving him, the origin of it. He seemed to be a very fearless, strong, tremendous tempered man with great force; he even looked like a Corsican bandit. But he had no power over the forces that were pushing him. That is what frightens me.
Anaïs Nin
Enough,' said Mercedes, 'enough Edmond! Believe me that she who alone recognized you has been the only one to comprehend you. And had she crossed your path, and you had crushed her like a frail glass, still, Edmond, still she must have admired you! Like the gulf between me and the past, there is an abyss between you, Edmond, and the rest of mankind; and I tell you freely, that the comparison I drew between you and other men will be one of my greatest tortures. No! there is nothing in the world to resemble you in worth and goodness!
Alexandre Dumas
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Immodest creature, you do not want a woman who will accept your faults, you want the one who pretends you are faultless – one who will caress the hand that strikes her and kiss the lips that lie to
George Sand
The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
To lie is always a necessity for women; above all when they choose to deceive, falsehood becomes vital to them.
Marquis de Sade
The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.
Victor Hugo
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
Victor Hugo
Oh! Science! Everything has been revised. For the body and for the soul,--the viaticum,—there are medicine and philosophy,—old wives' remedies and popular songs rearranged. And the pastimes of princes and games they proscribed! Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry!...Science, the new nobility! Progress. The world marches on! Why shouldn’t it turn?It is the vision of numbers. We are going toward the Spirit. There’s no doubt about it, an oracle, I tell you. I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.
Arthur Rimbaud
Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.
Milan Kundera
There is something divine in mindless beauty.
Albert Camus
Lucien took the cigar and lit it, in the Spanish fashion, from that of the priest. "He is right," Lucien thought; "there is plenty of time to kill myself.
Honoré de Balzac
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
Michel de Montaigne
If people did not love one another, I really don't see what use there would be in having any spring.
Victor Hugo
O seasons, O castles,What soul is without flaws?All its lore is known to me,Felicity, it enchants us all.
Arthur Rimbaud
Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.
Milan Kundera
Failure is not our only punishment for laziness: there is also the success of others.
Jules Renard
After awhile you could get used to anything.
Albert Camus
Her presence had awakened in him a man suddenly whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in action.
Anaïs Nin
Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
Voltaire
Much more likely you’ll hurt me. Still what does it matter? If I’ve got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Partout où il y a représentation indépendante, le spectacle se reconstitue.
Guy Debord
There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.
André Malraux
...it is not for the illusion of a moment to govern the choice of a lifetime.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Your wolf is eating that man. I thought you should know.
Joanne Harris
Why is it that showers and even storms seem to come by chance, so that many people think it quite natural to pray for rain or fine weather, though they would consider it ridiculous to ask for an eclipse by prayer?
Henri Poincaré
Fool that I am," said he,"that I did not tear out my heart the day I resolved to revenge myself".
Alexandre Dumas
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
Marcel Proust
The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).
George Steiner