Quotes by French Authors - Page 95

Oh! my friend, never seek to corrupt the person whom you love, it can go further than you think...
Marquis de Sade
Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
Roland Barthes
What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
Albert Camus
I believe in Supreme Being, a Creator, whoever he may be, it's of no importance to me, who put us here on earth to do our duty as citizens and fathers; but I don't need to go to church and kiss silver platters and dig into my pocket to fatten up a lot of humbugs who eat better than you or I do! Because he can be worshiped just as well in a wood, a field, or even just gazing at the ethereal vault, like the ancients.
Gustave Flaubert
The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.
Victor Hugo
I know not what quintessence of all this mixture, which, seizing my whole will, carried it to plunge and lose itself in his, and that having seized his whole will, brought it back with equal concurrence and appetite to plunge and lose itself in mine.
Michel de Montaigne
To govern is to choose.
Pierre Mendes-France
poetry’s favourite moment is when one loses one’s footing because of a landslide or seismic shaking of thought
Michel Leiris
For there comes a time in life when the pity previously reserved only for children takes on a different form, a time when we study the faces of 'old people' and sense that one day we will be just like them. And that is the moment when early childhood comes to an end.
Irène Némirovsky
People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.
Roman Payne
English:Ô, take this eager dance you fool, don’t brandish your stick at me. I have several reasons to travel on, on to the endless sea: I have lost my love. I’ve drunk my purse. My girl has gone, and left me rags to sleep upon. These old man’s gloves conceal the hands with which I’ve killed but one!Francais: Idiot, prends cette danse ardente, au lieu de tendre ton bâton.J'en ai des raisons de voyager encore sur la mer infinie: J'ai perdu l'amour et j'ai bu ma bourse.Ma belle m'a quitté, j'ai ses haillons pour m'abriter. Mes gants de vieillard cachent les mains d'un fameux assassin!
Roman Payne
Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.
Milan Kundera
History is full of religious wars; but, we must take care to observe, it was not the multiplicity of religions that produced these wars, it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing.
Montesquieu
There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.
André Breton
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic the passions that we feel expand it those that we inspire contract it and habit fills up what remains.
Marcel Proust
Simple truths are a relief from grand speculations.
Vauvenargues
Books should not be loved selfishly. Neither books nor anything else, in fact.
Marie-Sabine Roger
To all the readers,whom despitethe attraction of tv,of internet,of family troubles,of video games,of sport,of night clubs,have found some hoursso we can all dream together.
Bernard Werber
Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.
Albert Camus
For no one, in our long decline,So dusty, spiteful and divided,Had quite such pleasant friends as mine,Or loved them half as much as I did.
Hilaire Belloc
All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction.
Voltaire
[I]t is that we are too apt to despise what appears to be neither good nor beautiful, and thus we lose what is helpful and salutary.
George Sand
Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never have let you have that back." ...
Marcel Proust
In the morning, when he entered my room, I grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to me, all the same. One cannot defend oneself against those brats. They take hold of you, they hold you fast, they never let you go again. The truth is, that there never was a cupid like that child.
Victor Hugo
The best minds have their soft spots and sometimes feel somewhat bruised by the scant respect of logic.
Victor Hugo
All our religion is but a false religion, and all our virtues are mere illusions and we ourselves are only hypocrites in the sight of God, if we have not that universal charity for everyone--for the good, and for the bad, for the poor and for the rich, and for all those who do us harm as much as those who do us good.
John Vianney
Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué."[Letter to Armand Barbès, 12 May 1867]
George Sand
Yet feminism has never killed anyone. Machismo, it kills every day.
Benoîte Groult
It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.
Louise Bourgeois
As for me, I feel myself living and thinking in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives profoundly different from mine, of a taste opposite to mine, where I find nothing of my conscious thought, where my imagination is excited by feeling itself plunged into the depths of the non-ego; I feel happy only when setting foot—on the Avenue de la Gare, on the Port, or on the Place de l'Eglise—in one of those provincial hotels with cold, long corridors where the wind from outside contends successfully with the efforts of the heating system, where the detailed geographic map of the district is still the sole ornament on the walls, where each noise helps only to make the silence appear by displacing it, where the rooms keep a musty perfume which the open air comes to wash, but does not eliminate, and which the nostrils inhale a hundred times in order to bring it to the imagination, which is enchanted with it, which has it pose like a model to try to recreate it with all the thoughts and remembrances that it contains...
Marcel Proust
It's a hypothesis. History won't take us far enough to confirm it. And our certainties never really hold water. One day you feel like dying and the next you realize all you had to do was go down a few stairs to find the light switch so you could see things a bit more clearly.
Anna Gavalda
But the Lord often leaves his servants, not only to be annoyed by the violence of the wicked, but to be lacerated and destroyed; allows the good to languish in obscurity and squalid poverty, while the ungodly shine forth, as it were, among the stars; and even by withdrawing the light of his countenance does not leave them lasting joy. Wherefore, David by no means disguises the fact, that if believers fix their eyes on the present condition of the world, they will be grievously tempted to believe that with God integrity has neither favour nor reward; so much does impiety prosper and flourish, while the godly are oppressed with ignominy, poverty, contempt, and every kind of cross. The Psalmist says, "But as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh slipped. For I was envious of the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked." At length, after a statement of the case, he concludes, "When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me: until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end," (Ps. 73:2, 3, 16, 17).
John Calvin
Everything she wanted to tell her, was unable to tell her, because she was afraid of hearing her own voice come out of her heart and be covered with blood, and then she poured all the blood into these syllables, and she offered it to her to drink like this : “You have it.
Hélène Cixous
So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;—in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use. HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862. [Translation by Isabel F. Hapgood]
Victor Hugo
A few observations and much reasoning lead to error many observations and a little reasoning to truth.
Alexis Carrel
it would be fairer to say I have traveled widely, without ever leaving my own native soil, I've traveled, one might say, through literature, each time I've opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout my odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, I'd just pick a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters
Alain Mabanckou
I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
Roland Barthes
We are not impotent. We can choose how we allow circumstances and experiences to influence us. We can change our interpretation of what happened and we can adjust our response to this interpretation.
Margaretha Montagu
I desire no other evidence of the truth to Christianity than the Lord's Prayer.
Mme. De Stael
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
Stendhal
If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is their father.
Jean de La Bruyère
One has to understand that equality ends up by infiltrating the world of politics as it does everywhere else. It would be impossible to imagine men forever unequal in one respect, yet equal in others; they must, in the end, come to be equal in all.Now, I am aware of only two means of establishing equality in the world of politics: rights have to be granted to every citizen or to none.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Injustice in the end produces independence.
Voltaire
Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary. He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he drops through the trapdoor another puppet is in readiness to take his place.
Rémy de Gourmont
(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.
Julio Cortázar
Losses are comparative imagination only makes them of any moment.
Blaise Pascal
Inflation consists of subsidizing expenditures that give no returns with money that does not exist.
Jacques Rueff
The man raised his glass, 'To you!'Can't you think of a wittier t
Milan Kundera
Não é verdade que a felicidade é aquilo que procuramos sem nunca sermos capazes de a reconhecer?
Marc Levy
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.
Milan Kundera
The scholar seeks the artist finds.
André Gide
Postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta", catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical.
Jean-François Lyotard
Who is content with nothing possesses all things.
Nicolas Boileau
It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
Our image is here and will for ever stay,and there is comfort in knowing that the memory of our lives will always be there,traveling among the stars.
Christophe Galfard
I prefer an accommodation vice to an obstinate virtue.
Molière
The life of the cenobite is a human problem. When we speak of convents, those seats of error but innocence, of mistaken views but good intentions, of ignorance but devotion, of torment but martyrdom, we must nearly always say yes or no...The monastery is a renunciation. Self-sacrifice, even when misdirected, is still self-sacrifice. To assume as duty a strict error has its peculiar grandeur.
Victor Hugo
We must like what we have when we don't have what we like.
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin