Quotes by French Authors - Page 11

Simple truths are a relief from grand speculations.
Vauvenargues
In Sanskrit, there exists no word for ‘The Individual’ (L’Individu). En Grèce antique, il n’y avait aucun mot pour dire ‘Devoir’ (Duty). In French, the word for ‘Wife’ is the same as the word for ‘Woman.’ En anglais, nous n’avons aucun mot semblable à l’exquise ‘Jouissance!
Roman Payne
Dandies, who – as you know - scorn all emotions as being beneath them, and do not believe, like that simpleton Goethe, that astonishment can ever be a proper feeling for the human mind.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.
Albert Camus
What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant...
Victor Hugo
He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.
Anaïs Nin
Genius is a promontory jutting out of the infinite.
Victor Hugo
I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure.
Roman Payne
The world was a sick animal, a sort of huge cancerous tumour, a thing of bubbling liquids, whitish patches, dribbling pus, fantastic pimples of dead skin that grew in all directions, swelled up, became more and more like fuzzy hair. The right thing would be to go away, to vanish for ever from the face of the sun.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
Gaston Bachelard
To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
Jean-Luc Godard
Thought is the labour of the intellect reverie is its pleasure.
Victor Hugo
The Dutch fetishes who converted me tell me every Sunday that the blacks and whites are all children of one father, whom they call Adam. As for me, I do not understand anything of genealogies; but if what these preachers say is true, we are all second cousins; and you must allow that it is impossible to be worse treated by our relations than we are.
Voltaire
Luck is a word devoid of sense nothing can exist without a cause.
Voltaire
We undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits their sickness and their health.
Michel de Montaigne
Business? It's quite simple. It's other people's money.
Alexandre Dumas
Les rêves sont seuls les réalités de la vie.
Xavier Forneret
He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
Milan Kundera
I believe you can consider yourself a successful prose writer when the number of words you put on a page each day is equal to, or greater than, the number of milligrams of mind-altering chemicals you ingest in that day. (Note: this rule does not apply to poets who write in the short-form. You, my boys and girls, are free as birds!)
Roman Payne
One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of shore for a very long time.
André Gide
look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you...
Colette
Those who have nothing have only their discipline.
Alain Badiou
For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue — that I had to do the job myself.
Anaïs Nin
The uniform is that which we do not choose, that which is assigned to us; it is the certitude of the universal against the precariousness of the individual. When the values that were once so solid come under challenge and withdraw, heads bowed, he who cannot live without them (without fidelity, family, country, discipline, without love) buttons himself up in the universality of his uniform as if that uniform were the last shred of transcendence that could protect him against the cold of a future in which there will be nothing left to respect.
Milan Kundera
...all the men in the photograph wear puttees. All the men in the picture are bound, trying to keep themselves together. That is how considerate they are, for the love of God and country and women and the other men--for the love of all that is good and true--they keep themselves together because they have to. They are afraid but they are not cowards.
Elena Mauli Shapiro
A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.
Guy de Maupassant
Pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall.
Gustave Flaubert
We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.
Gustave Flaubert
I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.
Georges Duhamel
But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
Albert Camus
Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful place in a house is the lavatory.
Théophile Gautier
My mother, writing from France, admonished me to take care of my health as she had during the war. My head could be all set for the guillotine, and still my mother would scold me for forgetting my muffler. She never missed an opportunity to try and convince me that the world is a kindly place and that she'd done a good job in conceiving me. This alleged Providence was the great subterfuge of maternal thoughtlessness.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
When I religiously confess myself to myself I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.
Michel de Montaigne
A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
Charles Péguy
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
My dear,In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.I realized, through it all, that…In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.Truly yours,Albert Camus”I like this because only one part is usually quoted but the full quote has such symmetry.
Albert Camus
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie.
Gustave Flaubert
It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgment to be silent.
Jean de La Bruyère
everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure
Alexis de Tocqueville
I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?
Guy de Maupassant
How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.
Coco Chanel
A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failures certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
Alexandre Dumas
Tarrou had "lost the match," as he put it. But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing affection and being destined one day to remember it. So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarrou, perhaps, would have called that winning the match.
Albert Camus
Flesh is willing, but the Soul requiresSisyphean patience for its song,Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shortand Art is long.
Charles Baudelaire
Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.
Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
Doing his utmost, deploying all his energy, a young man setting out from zero can wind up after ten years somewhere below where he started.
Honoré de Balzac
I don’t think I’m made for any earthly kind of pleasure.
Claude Monet
Read in oreder to live
Gustave Flaubert
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
Gustave Flaubert
For others, in spite of myself, from myself.
Emmanuel Levinas
I know that in the end you'll overwhelm me, but I'll still fight you as long as there's a breath in my body... Yes, you've robbed me of everything: the laurels of glory, the roses of love! But there's one thing you can't take away from me. When I go to meet God this evening, and doff my hat before the lofty gates, my salute will sweep the blue threshold of heaven, because I'll still have one thing intact, without a stain, something that I'll take with me in spite of you: My white plume.
Edmond Rostand
Dear Father, I already forgave you once. I read all your letters, which fed me crumbs of love and admiration. LIke Hansel and Gretel, I followed their trail to your door. But you have left me again. I have the whole summer ahead of me to re-read your letters, and to try to understand.
Susie Morgenstern
But one gets tired of everything, even of abusing a person. Paris abandons its puppets which it raises to the throne as quickly as it does its martyrs whom it hoists on the gibbet; in its perpetual hunger for new playthings, it never gets itself excited overly much before the statues of its heroes or at the sight of the blood of its victims.
Octave Mirbeau
Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.
André Gide
To penetrate one's being one must go armed to the teeth.
Paul Valéry
When he [Malevranche] happened to find Descartes' book entitled Man in a book shop on the rue Saint Jaques, he leafed through it, bought it and "read it with so much pleasure that he was forced at times to interrupt his reading, so loud were the beatings of his heart due to the extreme pleasure he had in doing so". Those who never put down a book of erudition, science or philosophy, to catch their breath, so to speak, and recover from the strong emotion they experience, certainly ignore of of the most exquisite pleasures of intellectual life.
Étienne Gilson
The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air;...
Marcel Proust
Time is an avid gambler who has no need to cheat to win every time.
Charles Baudelaire
A clock that is moving through space at a very fast speed does not tick at the same rate as a slow-moving watch gently attached to your wrist as you stroll on a tropical beach. The idea of a universal time - a godlike clock that could somehow sit outside our universe and measure, in one go, the movement of everything in it, how its evolution unfolds, how old it is and all that - does not exist.
Christophe Galfard