Quotes by French Authors - Page 93

When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her name was to be in the title of the story, it almost always worked. Then, later, when we'd passed a night of delicious love-making together, after she’d gone and I’d felt that feeling of happiness mixed with sorrow, I sometimes would write a book or story about her. Sometimes her character, her way about herself, her love-making, it sometimes marked me so heavily that I couldn't go on in life and be happy unless I wrote a book or a story about that woman, the happy and sad memory of that woman. That was the only way to keep her, and to say goodbye to her without her ever leaving.
Roman Payne
The Empire was on the point of turning Paris into the bawdy house of Europe. The gang of fortune-seekers who had succeeded in stealing a throne required a reign of adventures, shady transactions, sold consciences, bought women, and rampant drunkenness.
Émile Zola
Probability theory is nothing more than common sense reduced to calculation. -1819
Pierre-Simon Laplace
That was unthinkable, he said; all men believe in God, even those who reject Him. Of this he was absolutely sure; if ever he came to doubt it, his life would lose all meaning.
Albert Camus
He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.
Victor Hugo
Hang yourself brave Crillon. We fought at Arques and you were not there.
Henry IV
She is my morning, she is my evening; we have a love that blooms over and again, more beautifully each time than the last. You will see that we are not lovers like others, for whom love is both a punishment and a gift… Our love has never punished, only rewarded. Such love therein lies the eudaimonic life.
Roman Payne
I want to be famous but unknown!
Edgar Degas
Then I realized the vital necessity of art. Human life, yes, you nurse people, you clean house, you market, but then comes the moment of solace and flight. i sit and write and summon other friends, other forms of life, other experiences, and the voyage and the exploration, the delving into character, the vast expanse of life's possibilities and potentialities, contemplation of future travels, of dazzling friendships, all this then makes the chores and the sacrifices beautiful because they are diverted toward some beautiful aim, they become part of the structure of a work of art.
Anaïs Nin
Our zeal works wonders, whenever it supports our inclination toward hatred, cruelty, ambition.
Michel de Montaigne
Help yourself and heaven will help you.
Jean de La Fontaine
Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius for construction, which are part of man's natural endowment, get full play there. The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.
Albert Camus
Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred.
Honoré de Balzac
The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much. It makes nonsense to say that men have, on the one hand, rights, and on the other hand, obligations. Such words only express differences in point of view. The actual relationship between the two is as between object and subject. A man, considered in isolation, only has duties, amongst which are certain duties towards himself. A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.
Simone Weil
What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.
Marcel Proust
It is vain to try to sacrifice once for all one'syouthful ideals.
Paul Bourget
Everyone knows that God protects drunkards and lovers.
Alexandre Dumas
One who has lost confidence can lose nothing more.
Pierre-Claude-Victor Boiste
We can act only in our time, among the people who surround us. We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. Since all contemporary action leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether, and why, we have the right to kill.
Albert Camus
The greater part of a men who speak ill of women are speaking of a certain woman.
Rémy de Gourmont
First of all, I wish you love, and that by loving you may also be loved.But if it’s not like that, be brief in forgettingAnd after you’ve forgotten, don’t keep anything.
Victor Hugo
Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.
Albert Camus
The loudspeaker on the wall crackles, hisses, and suddenly announces, in astonishingly soothing tones, that a train is going to be delayed. An ocean swell of sighs ripples through the waiting room.
Andreï Makine
Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.
Jean Baudrillard
One is not born a woman - one becomes one.
Simone de Beauvoir
The most clear-sided view of the darkest possible situation is itself an act of optimism
Jean-Paul Sartre
The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverse is, one has an ideological production). The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.In saying this, I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author…
Michel Foucault
What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.
Emil M. Cioran
He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.
Alexandre Dumas
However anxious one is to reach one’s goal, one can excuse delays on the route when these are caused by ovations.
Alexandre Dumas
So difficult is it for us to know, with the dead as with the living, whether a thing would cause them joy or sorrow!
Marcel Proust
People are always ashamed of the misery that has befallen them, as though it were an act of divine retribution for a long-forgotten sin of theirs
Pascal Garnier
I have always differentiated between two types of friends those who want proofs of friendship and those who do not. One kind loves me for myself and the others for themselves.
Gérard de Nerval
Forethought we may have undoubtedly but not foresight.
Napoleon
Women naturally prefer their ideas to their sensations.
Albert Camus
Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves.
André Gide
I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.
Gustave Flaubert
Ô, Wanderess, WanderessWhen did you feel your most euphoric kiss? Was I the source of your greatest bliss?
Roman Payne
He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy . . . who had left upon every field of victory in Europe drops of that same blood which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown grey before his time in discipline and in command, who had lived with his sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade blackened by powder, his forehead wrinkled by the cap, in the barracks, in the camp, in the bivouac, in the ambulance, and who after twenty years had returned from the great wars with his cheek scarred, his face smiling, simple, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done everything for France and nothing against her.
Victor Hugo
You will have five hundred million little bells, and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot.
Eugène Ionesco
They were the men and the women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They appeared as in a dream, at the crest of a dune, as if they were born of the cloudless sky.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
I am not afraid of a fight I have to do my duty come what may.
Therese of Lisieux
Our ignorance of history makes us libel to our own times. People have always been like this.
Gustave Flaubert
Those horses must have been Spanish jennets, born of mares mated with a zephyr; for they went as swiftly as the wind, and the moon, which had risen at our departure to give us light, rolled through the sky like a wheel detached from its carriage...
Théophile Gautier
The whole world is not worth one soul.
Francis de Sales
Not only does the State do the work badly on a domain not its own, bunglingly, at greater cost, and with less fruit than spontaneous organizations, but, again, through the legal monopoly which it deems its prerogative, or through the overwhelming competition which it exercises, it kills or paralyzes these natural organizations or prevents their birth; and hence so many precious organs, which, absorbed, atropic or abortive, are lost to the great social body.
Hippolyte Taine
If there is a sin against life it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Albert Camus
Aures habent et non audient` - `They have ears but hear not
Jules Verne
Believe me, my boy, women don't love a man for himself but as a weapon against other women.
Irène Némirovsky
We can only feel sorry for ourselves when our misfortunes are still supportable. Once this limit is crossed, the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it.
Marjane Satrapi
But a vague jealousy, one of those dormant jealousies that develop between brothers or sisters almost unnoticed until maturity, only to burst out when one of them marries or has a stroke of good fortune, kept them constantly on the alert in a fraternal, unaggressive hostility. They did love each other, yet they kept an eye on each other.
Guy de Maupassant
In jealousy there is more self-love than love.
La Rochefoucauld
We only make a dupe of the friend whose advice we ask for we never tell him all and it is usually what we have left unsaid that decides our conduct.
Diane de Poitiers
I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.
Georges Bataille
A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense", sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millenia.
Albert Camus
Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.
René Descartes
Flesh is willing, but the Soul requiresSisyphean patience for its song,Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shortand Art is long.
Charles Baudelaire
Necessity is often the spur to genius.
Honoré de Balzac