Quotes by French Authors - Page 10

But my faith seems naive, at least today. Maybe tomorrow I can believe again.
Anaïs Nin
As to moral courage I have very rarely met with the two o'clock in the morning kind. I mean unprepared courage that which is necessary on an unexpected occasion and which in spite of the most unforeseen events leaves full freedom of judgement and decision.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.
Marcel Proust
In all Thénardier's outpourings, the words and gestures, the fury blazing in his eyes, this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado and abjectness, arrogance, pettiness, rage, absurdity; the hodgepodge of genuine distress, and lying sentiment, the shamelessness of a vicious man rejoicing in viciousness, the bare crudity of an ugly soul -- in this eruption of all suffering and hatred there was something which was hideous as evil itself and still as poignant as truth.
Victor Hugo
I am the soul in limbo.
André Breton
Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting.
Gustave Flaubert
Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?
Paul Gauguin
Friendship requires great communication.
Saint Francis de Sales
The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages.
Cyrano de Bergerac
Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.
Albert Camus
Equality, citizens, is not the whole of society on a level, a society of tall blades of grass and small oaks, or a number of entangled jealousies. It is, legally speaking, every aptitude having the same opportunity for a career; politically all consciences having the same right. Equality has an organ, gratuitous and compulsory education. We must begin with the right to the alphabet.
Victor Hugo
If you wait for the perfect moment when all is safe and assured it may never arrive. Mountains will not be climbed races won or lasting happiness achieved.
Maurice Chevalier
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
Albert Camus
Everyone is wrong about the future.
Milan Kundera
Tenderness is the repose of passion.
Joseph Joubert
Warfare is now an interlocking system of actions—political, economic,psychological, military—that aims at the overthrow of the establishedauthority in a country and its replacement by another regime.
Roger Trinquier
Art is not religion, 'it doesn't even lead to religion.' But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.
Maurice Blanchot
For Milady was well aware that her most seductive power was in her voice, which could run skilfully through the whole scale of tones, from mortal speech, upwards to the language of heaven.
Alexandre Dumas
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
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
We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love
Germaine de Staël
Rather than allowing a book's intelligence to speak through our mouths, we replace it with our own intelligence as we talk about it. Rather than acting as emissary for the book, we become guardians of the temple, boasting of its wonders in the very words that slam shut it's doors: Reading matters! Reading matters!
Daniel Pennac
It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be a bad one.
Marcel Proust
Contemplating a flame perpetuates a primordial reverie. It separates us from the world and enlarges our world as dreamers. In itself the flame is a major presence, but being close to it makes us dream of far away, too far away. The flame is there, feeble and tiny, struggling to stay in existence, and the dreamer goes on to dream of elsewhere, losing his own being by dreaming on a grand, on a too grand scale by dreaming of the world.
Gaston Bachelard
It would be the height of absurdity to label ignorance tempered by humility "faith"!(Institutio III.2.3)
John Calvin
The nearer a soul is to God, the more it deserves our esteem; the closer the ties that bit it to us, the more sensible is our love for it, and the more whole-hearted should be the devotion we show in all that concerns family, country, vocation, and friendship. Thus, instead of destroying patriotism, charity exalts it, as we see in the case of St. Joan of Arc or St. Louis.
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange
Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands.
Gustave Flaubert
Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!
Roman Payne
If one were to build the house of happiness, the largest space would be the waiting room.
Jules Renard
For the maintenance of peace nations should avoid the pin-pricks which forerun cannon-shots.
Napoleon
The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat - Like an unsuccessful literary man.
Hilaire Belloc
[As a very young man, I thought] of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen.
Roman Payne
On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
Albert Camus
On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
Gustave Flaubert
To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Do not be alarmed if they look paler than the other maidens of Greece. They are scarcely of this Earth, and seem to be shaking off the sleep of a past life.
Charles Nodier
Pain is the root of knowledge.
Simone Weil
- Losing is all that's left, I say.- Losing is all we've got left to lose, you sayThe impossibility of not telling, I cannot do otherwise, one can only tell otherwise, with always the same need to make sense of what you've lost, the need not to lose this feeling of losing, the need to feel yourself not losing this feeling that you are still losing the irreplaceable.
Hélène Cixous
It is not the mere fear of punishment that restrains [man] from sin. Loving and revering God as his father, honouring and obeying Him as his master, although there were no hell, he would revolt at the very idea of offending Him.
John Calvin
And so too, in later years, when I began to write a book of my own, and the quality of some sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to go on with the undertaking. I would find the equivalent in Bergotte. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages, that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I had perceived in my mind's eye, and in my fear of their not turning out "true to life," how could I find time to ask myself whether what I was writing was pleasing!
Marcel Proust
I hasten to laugh at everything for fear of being obliged to weep.
Pierre Beaumarchais
Look: each moment is a cradle and a casket: may all life and all death seem strange to you.
Marcel Schwob
Inspiration comes of working every day.
Charles Baudelaire
For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
Milan Kundera
Speaking of Newton but also commenting more broadly on education and the Enlightenment: "I have seen a professor of mathematics only because he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.
Voltaire
Man's greatest wisdom is to choose his obsession well.
Éliphas Lévi
To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.
Marcel Proust
Le bonheur est cette danse où l'on s'approche et l'on s'écarte sans se perdre. Il est même fait des larmes des longues séparations à condition que viennent les retrouvailles.
Timothée de Fombelle
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
Étienne de La Boétie
The heart has its own reasons that reason can't understand.
Voltaire
Heroes are damned. No mortal conquers Death.
Shan Sa
It is fathomless, since it is God. One flings into that well the labor of one's whole life, one flings in one's fortune, one flings in one's riches, one flings in one's success, one flings in one's liberty or fatherland, one flings in one's well-being, one flings in one's repose, one flings in one's joy! More! more! more! Empty the vase! tip the urn! One must finish by flinging in one's heart.
Victor Hugo
Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.
Man Ray
The discrepancy between the modern observance and the prescriptions of the Rule had struck me ever since the novitiate, and no satisfactory explanation had ever been given to me. People said that man had changed: the weakness of people's health no longer allows us to fast. Was it true?
Adalbert de Vogüé
I don't know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I'm some kind of a Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.
Henri Matisse
The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.
Voltaire
When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep's: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster.
Maurice Blanchot
Christianity taught us to see the eye of the lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.
Gilles Deleuze
I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about the rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. the marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected.
Antoine De Saint Exupery