Quotes by French Authors - Page 98

Even from the point of view of coquetry, pure and simple," he had told her, "can't you see how much of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying?
Marcel Proust
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.
Marcel Proust
The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
Michel de Montaigne
Erik: Are you very tired?Christine: Oh, tonight I gave you my soul, and I am dead.Erik: Your soul is a beautiful thing, child. No emperor received so fair a gift. The angels wept to-night.
Gaston Leroux
The season was waning fastOur nights were growing cold at lastI took her to bed with silk and song,'Lay still, my love, I won’t be long...I must prepare my body for passion.''O, your body you give, but all else you ration.''It is because of these dreams of a sylvan scene...A bleeding nymph to leave me serene...I have dreams of a trembling wench.''You have dreams,' she said, 'that cannot be quenched.''Our passion,' said I, 'should never be feared...As our longing for love can never be cured...Our want is our way and our way is our will...We have the love, my love, that no one can kill.''If night is your love, then in dreams you’ll fulfill...This love, our love, that no one can kill.'Yet want is my way, and my way is my will,Thus I killed my love with a sleeping pill.
Roman Payne
...that this monster, who is only one in form, has a heart so humane that he should not be persecuted for a deformity which he refrains from rendering more hideous by his actions...
Gabrielle Suzanne Barbot De Villeneuve
When one woman strikes at the heart of another, she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Make thought a whirlwind.
Victor Hugo
There are some catastrophes that a poor writer's pen cannot describe and which he is obliged to leave to the imagination of his readers with a bald statement of the facts.
Alexandre Dumas
I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.
Victor Hugo
Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?
Jean-Paul Sartre
(…) symbolism did not fall out of heaven or rise out of subterranean depths: it was elaborated like language, by the human reality…
Simone de Beauvoir
The critical spirit rises up against itself and consumes its form. But instead of coming out of this process greater and purified, it devours itself in a kind of self-cannibalism and takes a morose pleasure in annihilating itself. Hyper-criticism eventuates in self-hatred, leaving behind it only ruins. A new dogma of demolition is born out of the rejection of dogmas. Thus we euro-americans are supposed to have only one obligation: endlessly atoning for what we have inflicted on other parts of humanity. How can we fail to see that this leads us to live off self-denunciation while taking a strange pride in being the worst? Self-denigration is all too clearly a form of indirect self-glorification. Evil can come only from us; other people are motivated by sympathy, good will, candor. This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history.
Pascal Bruckner
I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.
Voltaire
Our eyes will know the heavens if our lips stay for each other.
Roman Payne
Ah, this dear old planet! All is clear now. We know ourselves; we now know of what we are capable.
Albert Camus
Paul, Paul, this is the claim you never made, the fervor you never showed. You were so cool and light, so elusive, and I never felt you encircling me and claiming possession. Rango is saying all the words I wanted to hear you say. You never came close to me, even while taking me. You took me as men take foreign women in distant countries whose language they cannot speak. You took me in silence and strangeness.
Anaïs Nin
This stretch through the fogbound forest gradually lulled Grange into his favorite daydream; in it he saw an image of his life: all that he had he carried with him; twenty feet away, the world grew dark, perspectives blurred, and there was nothing near him but this close halo of warm consciousness, this nest perched high above the vague earth.
Julien Gracq
A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities.
Charles de Gaulle
The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of "perversions." Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.
Michel Foucault
A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.
André Gide
For life is too short to resign ourselves to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women we don't love.
Anne Garréta
My Love wakes in a puddle of sunlight.Her hands asleep beside her.Her hair draped on the lawnlike a mantle of cloth.I give her my lifefor our love is wholeI sing her beauty in my soul.
Roman Payne
A painter is someone who wipes the windowpane between the world and us with light, with a rag made of light, soaked in silence.
Christian Bobin
A friendship that can be ended didn't ever start.
Mellin de Saint-Gelais
This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have been difficult for me to understand. It was a very long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama, “Go with the boy.” The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me.
Marcel Proust
Having lived with kings, I have become a king in my own home.
Voltaire
Every age can be enchanting provided you live within it.
Brigitte Bardot
Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: "In reality, who am I?" The defensive attitudes created by this violent bringing together of the colonised man and the colonial system form themselves into a structures which then reveals the colonised personality. This 'sensitivity' is easily understood if we simply study and are alive to the number and depth of the injuries inflicted upon a native during a single day spent amidst the colonial regime. It must in any case be remembered that a colonised people is not only simply a dominated people. Under the German occupation the French remained men; under the French occupation, the Germans remained men. In Algeria there is not simply the domination but the decision to the letter not to occupy anything more than the sum total of the land.
Frantz Fanon
Sonnez, grelots; sonnez, clochettes; sonnez, cloches!Car mon rêve impossible a pris corps et je l’aiEntre mes bras pressé : le Bonheur, cet ailéVoyageur qui de l’Homme évite les approches,- Sonnez grelots; sonnez, clochettes, sonnez, cloches!Le Bonheur a marché côte à côte avec moi;Mais la FATALITÉ ne connaît point de trêve :Le ver est dans le fruit, le réveil dans le rêve,Et le remords est dans l’amour : telle est la loi.- Le Bonheur a marché côte à côte avec moi.
Paul Verlaine
Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief.
Frantz Fanon
I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me,and I have followed the source of rivers towards theirsource or plunged into forests, always making for othercities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; andI could never turn back any more than a record can spinin reverse. And all that was leading me where ?To this very moment...
Jean-Paul Sartre
Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.
Denis Diderot
Chance favours the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.
Voltaire
Clones fit in. Freaks stand out. Ask me which one I prefer.
Joanne Harris
... the courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the 'other side'...
Marcel Proust
Because things are not agreeable," said Jean Valjean, "that is no reason for being unjust towards God.
Victor Hugo
Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.
Victor Hugo
All writing is filth
Antonin Artaud
Life is stronger than you are, even when you deny it, even when you neglect it, even when you refuse to admit it.
Anna Gavalda
In order to justify your nonsense, you continue to fight battles won long ago. You rage against threats that exist only in your mind....You focus on the colour of schoolbags, sexist pronouns, pink toys in Kinder Surprises and the sharing of dish-washing duties in relationships. All the while completely ignoring what it is that really threatens the freedom of women....Your aversion towards the patriarchy, manifested in the form of straight white males, has led you you to become bedfellows of all the other minorities who share that aversion.
Marion Le Pen
The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.
Albert Camus
It is faith and not reason which impels men to action. ... Intelligence is content to point out the road but never drives us along it.
Dr. Alexis Carrel
Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event
Gaston Bachelard
Une philosophie doit etre portative.
Paul Valéry
In each action we must look beyond the action at our past present and future state and at others whom it affects and see the relation of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
Blaise Pascal
when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
George Steiner
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
Jean Cocteau
After the great Impressionists, and again after Van Gogh and Gaugin, people said, 'Painting is now played out.' But Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Roussel and Vuillard appeared and gave them the lie. 'We were wrong,' said the croakers, 'but this at any rate is the end.' Yet to refute them, and to prove that there is no end to art, still another generation of painters sprang up.
Ambroise Vollard
I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.
Anaïs Nin
It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.
Man Ray
Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.
Albert Schweitzer
Everyone marries the Duke of Westminster. There are a lot of duchesses, but only one Coco Chanel.
Coco Chanel
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish.
Jules Renard
The truth is,’ replied Dantes, ‘that I am too happy for noisy mirth; ...joy takes a strange effect at times, it seems to oppress us almost the same as sorrow.
Alexandre Dumas
Democracy is a cry of war; it is the flag of the party of numbers placed below raised against those above. A flag sometimes raised in the name of the rights of men, but sometimes in the name of crude passions; sometimes raised against the most iniquitous usurpations but also sometimes against legitimate superiority.
François Guizot
Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances, and sometimes these loyalties conflict with one another and confront the person who harbors them with difficult choices
Amin Maalouf
One must not hope to be more than one can be.
Nicolas de Chamfort