Quotes by French Authors - Page 92

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.
Roman Payne
To get rich, one must have but a single idea, one fixed, hard, immutable thought: the desire to make a heap of gold. And in order to increase this heap of gold, one must be inflexible, a usurer, thief, extortionist, and murderer! And one must especially mistreat the small and the weak!And when this mountain of gold has been amassed, one can climb up on it, and from up on the summit, a smile on one’s lips, one can contemplate the valley of poor wretches that one has created.
Petrus Borel
If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water. Well, I've tried to express just that. If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirits.
Constantin Brancusi
A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
Paul Valéry
Always choose the most difficult way, there you will not meet competitors.
Charles de Gaulle
In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
By being natural and sincere, one often can create revolutions without having sought them.
Christian Dior
In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
Maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you've been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist if you don't know where you are? So you burn cars, ecause when you have no culture, you're no longer a civilised animal, you're a wild beast. And a wild beast burns and kills and pillages.
Muriel Barbery
Two things control man's nature: instinct and experience.
Blaise Pascal
During my stay in the United States, I witnessed the spontaneous formation of committees in a country for the pursuit and prosecution of a man who had committed a great crime. In Europe, a criminal is an unhappy man who is struggling for his life against the agents of power, whilst the people are merely a spectator of the conflict: in America, he is looked upon as an enemy of the human race, and the whole of mankind is against him.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Le but n'est rien, le développement est tout. Le spectacle ne veut en venir à rien d'autre qu'à lui-même.
Guy Debord
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being vanquished.
Charles Baudelaire
Weakness or strength: there you are, strength. You do not know where you are going, nor why you are going; enter anywhere, reply to anything. They will no more kill you than if you were a corpse.” In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.In cities, suddenly, the mud seemed red and black like a mirror when the lamp moves about in the adjoining room, like a treasure in the forest! Good luck, I cried, and I saw a sea of flames and smoke in the sky; to the right, to the left all the riches of the world flaming like a billion thunder-bolts.
Arthur Rimbaud
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid - one must also be polite.
Voltaire
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
Voltaire
It is a long road from conception to completion.
Molière
There comes a moment when the image of our life parts company with the life itself, stands free, and, little by little, begins to rule us. Already in The Joke: “I came to realize that there was no power capable of changing the image of my person lodged somewhere in the supreme court of human destinies; that this image (even though it bore no resemblance to me) was much more real than my actual self; that I was its shadow and not it mine; that I had no right to accuse it of bearing no resemblance to me, but rather that it was I who was guilty of the nonresemblance; and that the nonresemblance was my cross, which I could not unload on anyone else, which was mine alone to bear.”And in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “Destiny has no intention of lifting a finger for Mirek (for his happiness, his security, his good spirits, his health), whereas Mirek is ready to do everything for his destiny (for its grandeur, its clarity, its beauty, its style, its intelligible meaning). He felt responsible for his destiny, but his destiny did not feel responsible for him.
Milan Kundera
... the cattleyas especially (these being, with chrysanthemums, her favourite flowers), because they had the supreme merit of not looking in the least like other flowers, but of being made, apparently, out of scraps of silk or satin.
Marcel Proust
Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.
Marcel Proust
The great age of the earth will appear greater to man when he understands the origin of living organisms and the reasons for the gradual development and improvement of their organization. This antiquity will appear even greater when he realizes the length of time and the particular conditions which were necessary to bring all the living species into existence. This is particularly true since man is the latest result and present climax of this development, the ultimate limit of which, if it is ever reached, cannot be known.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.
George Sand
The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end grows near, each moment becomes more and more valuable and there is no time to waste on recollection. It's important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia, that it is most powerful in early youth , when the volume of life that has passed is quite small.
Milan Kundera
Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility--space itself--to be forgotten: space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions: a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.
Michel de Certeau
The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.
Albert Camus
Am I creating my own isolation? It seems to me that most of my acts are acts of integrity. So much takes place within me each day that by comparison I find a paucity, a stinginess, a silence in people which drives me to excess.
Anaïs Nin
Woe to him who becomes useless to human progress!
Ernest Renan
Fear could never make a virtue.
Voltaire
Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.
Gustave Flaubert
had no need of a guide to learn ignorance
Voltaire
The deep study of nature is the most fruitful source of mathematical discoveries. By offering to research a definite end, this study has the advantage of excluding vague questions and useless calculations; besides it is a sure means of forming analysis itself and of discovering the elements which it most concerns us to know, and which natural science ought always to conserve.
Joseph Fourier
Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.
Georges Clémenceau
Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory... Everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion - it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.
Albert Camus
When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock-market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows, money that produces more money? There are socioeconomic "complexes" that are also veritable complexes of the unconscious, and that communicate a voluptuous wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy (the military-industrial complex). And ideology, Oedipus, and the phallus have nothing to do with this, because they depend on it rather than being its impetus. For it is a matter of flows, of stocks, of breaks in and fluctuations of flows; desire is present wherever something flows and runs, carrying along with it interested subjects—but also drunken or slumbering subjects—toward lethal destinations.
Gilles Deleuze
The pleasure of criticizing takes away from us the pleasure of being moved by some very fine things.
Jean de La Bruyère
True wisdom consists in two things: Knowledge of God and Knowledge of Self.
John Calvin
The fact of knowing how to read is nothing the whole point is knowing what to read.
Jacques Ellul
I care not that this moment’s lot was thin and sparsely dealt all pleasures sweet can be forgot the instant they are felt.
Roman Payne
The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher; neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.
Christine de Pizan
The next step in the process is to measure the impact that these increases in reach have on your number of new transacting customers. The secret to a company’s reach strategy lies in the program’s ability not only to acquire fans, followers, subscribers and connections, but to convert them through its use of social media into transacting customers.
Olivier J. Blanchard
Police chiefs don't think a cat can possibly turn into a lion; and yet, it happens.
Victor Hugo
The little I know I owe to my ignorance.
Sacha Guitry
[The critic] serves up his erudition in strong doses; he pours out all the knowledge he got up the day before in some library or other, and treats in heathenish fashion people at whose feet he ought to sit, and the most ignorant of whom could give points to much wiser men than he.Authors bear this sort of thing with a magnanimity and a patience that are really incomprehensible. For, after all, who are those critics, who with their trenchant tone, their dicta, might be supposed sons of the gods? They are simply fellows who were at college with us, and who have turned their studies to less account, since they have not produced anything, and can do no more than soil and spoil the works of others, like true stymphalid vampires.
Théophile Gautier
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
Paul Valéry
Through their kisses and caresses they experienced a joy and wonder the equal of which has never been known or heard of. But I shall be silent...; for the rarest and most delectable pleasures are those which are hinted at, but never told.
Chrétien de Troyes
And then the great music of which the world is made took him over, beyond thought, beyond control until he heard her cry his name and they fell together off the edge of the world.
Jean Gill
Cruelty and fear shake hands together. An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
Honoré de Balzac
The will to conquer is the first condition of victory.
Marshal Ferdinand Foch
Le vin est la gaieté, dit-on ; comment cet océan de vin qui submerge la commune de Bercy n’égaye-t-il pas un peu ces navrants paysages ? Tout Bacchus est là ; Bacchus, chanté avec tant de constance par nos poètes ébriolants. Bacchus ne peut-il rasséréner ces horizons en deuil ? ou faut-il croire que Bacchus lui-même, ennemi de l’eau, est incommodé par le voisinage de la rivière ?
Paul Féval père
Personally I think there is only one thing to do: find the task we have been placed on this earth to do, and accomplish it as best we can, with all our strength, without making things complicated or thinking there's anything divine about our animal nature. This is the only way we will ever feel that we have been doing something constructive when death comes to get us.
Muriel Barbery
I loved your breaking down that door, repeated Djuna. Through Rango she had breathed some other realm she had never attained before. She had touched through his act some climate of violence she had never known before.
Anaïs Nin
My love for Neo-Tokyo is a bulbous massof post-human organic circuitry.Cyperpunk is my mother tongue.My love is a man-machine interface gun.
Yann Rousselot
The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind . . . From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.
Georges Bataille
Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be huge, those of Mars middle-sized, those of Venus very small. Unless it is the same everywhere. There are businessmen, police up there; people trade, fight, dethrone their kings.tSome shooting stars suddenly slid past, describing a course in the sky like the parabola of a monstrous rocket.t‘My Word,’ said Bouvard, ‘look at those worlds disappearing.’tPecuchet replied: ‘If our world in its turn danced about, the citizens of the stars would be no more impressed than we are now. Ideas like that are rather humbling.’t‘What is the point of it all?’t‘Perhaps there isn’t a point.’t‘Yet…’ and Pecuchet repeated the word two or three times, without finding anything more to say.
Gustave Flaubert
Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!
Honoré de Balzac
The poet must be more useful than any other member if his tribe.
Comte de Lautréamont
War is the national industry of Prussia.
Mirabeau