Quotes by French Authors - Page 12

Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.
Voltaire
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
May night continue to fall upon the orchestra
André Breton
We are entitled to violate history, provided that it results in handsome offspring.
Alexandre Dumas
I am alone. I am here. No one is watching me. In these hours of silence that I cherish, I talk to myself and reflect. That past, entrenched in time, motionless and infinite, has vanished onto thin air. None of it remains. Why, therefore, am I hurting so much? Why did I bring back with me this nameless pain? I followed the path I set for myself, and I have forgiven. I do not want to be chained to hatred or resentment. I want to have the right to live in peace.
Ingrid Betancourt
Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
Milan Kundera
Love is often a fruit of marriage.
Molière
Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.
Marcel Proust
When you're suffering, you're oversensitive to everything.
Henri Charrière
Nothing in life is worth,turning your back on,if you love it.
Albert Camus
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
André Gide
Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end nearer and that joyous watchwords like "forward" and "farther" are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it. (If fascination with the word "forward" has become universal, isn't it mainly because death is already speaking to us from nearby?)
Milan Kundera
Humour is an affirmation of dignity a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.
Romain Gary
To jealousy nothing is more frightful than laughter.
Françoise Sagan
We have a thousand possible, but only one is the target. (Nous avons mille possibles, - Mais un seul est la cible)
Charles de Leusse
Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.
Voltaire
The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that ‘black hole’ is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions—nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze.With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.
Flaubert Gustave
A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Then he remembered his wedding, the old times, the first pregnancy of his wife; he, too, had been very happy the day when he had taken her from her father to his home, and had carried her off on a pillion, trotting through the snow, for it was near Christmas-time, and the country was all white. She held him by one arm, her basket hanging from the other; the wind blew the long lace of her Cauchois headdress so that it sometimes flapped across his mouth, and when he turned his head he saw near him, on his shoulder, her little rosy face, smiling silently under the gold bands of her cap. To warm her hands she put them from time to time in his breast. How long ago it all was! Their son would have been thirty by now. Then he looked back and saw nothing on the road.
Gustave Flaubert
A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catastrophe.
Le Corbusier
And thenwe no longer distinguish far nor nearThey sleepdreamgather branchesfor this firethe cloud brewsagainst the powerless day —Long line of fugitivesbeneath the snow
Deborah Heissler
This intensely lyrical vision of the pregant woman in [i]Hope I[i] is set in an ambiguous context peopled with masks, death's heads and allegorical monsters such as Sin, Disease, Poverty and Death, all threatening the incipient life.
Gilles Néret
There's a chasm between envy and desire. Envy is like wanting something that's not yours. But desire is different. Desire comes out of wanting what is yours, and still wanting it even if it's not yet there, but it's not envy.
Michka Assayas
She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white.
Victor Hugo
It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Ephemeral spectator of an eternal spectacle, man raises for a second his eyes to Heaven, and closes them for ever; but, during that rapid second that is granted to him, from all the quarters of Heaven, and from the outer limits of the Universe, a consoling ray darts from each world and meets his eyes, to announce to him that some connection exists between him and infinity, and that even he is linked to eternity.
Xavier de Maistre
Ouch! What are you doing, Karl, you broke my skull!
Marjane Satrapi
The kingdom of God is peace in the Holy Spirit; He will reign in you if your heart is at peace. So, be at peace, Mademoiselle, and you will honor in a sovereign way the God of peace and love.
St. Vincent de Paul
I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.
Albert Camus
Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!
Honoré de Balzac
The clearest sign of wisdom is continued cheerfulness.
Michel de Montaigne
It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wife iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.
Trish Deseine
How many women are there ... who because of their husbands' harshness spend their weary lives in the bond of marriage in greater suffering than if they were slaves among the Saracens?
Christine de Pizan
Chance usually favors the prudent man.
Joseph Joubert
It was not that Madame Santeuil's moral values had altered, but only her view of the moral values of others.
Marcel Proust
Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future act now without delay.
Simone de Beauvoir
Ali Baba protects the lovers! Gives them the luck of bandits, and no guilt, for love fills certain people and expands them beyond all laws; there is no time, no place for regrets, hesitations, cowardices. Love runs free and reckless, and all the gentle trickeries perpetrated to protect others from its burns-those who are not the lovers but who might be the victims of this love's expansion.
Anaïs Nin
There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.
George Sand
But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.
Jean-Paul Sartre
To tell the truth, girls are no longer the way they used to be. They play gangsters, nowadays, just like boys. They organize rackets. They plan holdups and practice karate. They will rape defenseless adolescents. They wear pants... Life has become impossible.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
I know where there is more wisdom than is found in Napoleon Voltaire or all the ministers present and to come - in public opinion.
Talleyrand
Unkindness is inspired by hatred, anger fuels it into action in which there is no great joy; it would take sadism to turn it into something pleasurable; unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.
Marcel Proust
Distance is a great promoter of admiration!
Denis Diderot
Maupassant is a man of mitigating circumstances, the lawyer who can bring the jurors around by demonstrating that they too could have committed such a crime. We are all murderers.
Philippe Lejeune
Men in general are but great great children.
Napoleon
The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject the real and the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production.
Jean Baudrillard
But I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep shit. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity.
Michka Assayas
Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
Paul Valéry
All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.
Roman Payne
No point carrying useless ballast. It won't change a thing.
Joanne Harris
No love no friendship can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.
François Mauriac
The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way.Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.
Robert Bresson
In such blue beauty you sense the darkness into which the light will soon fall, and in this conjugal life of blue and black you find the one lesson of things that suits you, the proof of a certain excellence in this life where everything is given to us, every instant, blue with black, strength with hurt.
Christian Bobin
Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts florish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any expirienced in a town when it is under siege.
Voltaire
Ultimately, the purpose of a certification is to establish a particular level of proficiency in a discipline. Unfortunately, “social media” in and of itself, is not a discipline. Digital crisis management, on the other hand, is. So are digital customer service and online community management. This means that a certification program that focuses on social media without addressing each specific business function adapted to social media won’t end up certifying anyone in much of anything.
Olivier J. Blanchard
And then there are always clever people about to promise you that everything will be all right if only you put yourself out a bit... And you get carried away, you suffer so much from the things that exist that you ask for what can't ever exist. Now look at me, I was well away dreaming like a fool and seeing visions of a nice friendly life on good terms with everybody, and off I went, up into the clouds. And when you fall back into the mud it hurts a lot. No! None of it was true, none of those things we thought we could see existed at all. All that was really there was still more misery-- oh yes! as much of that as you like-- and bullets into the bargain!
Émile Zola
Democratic and aristocratic states are not in their own nature free. Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments; and even in these it is not always found. It is there only when there is no abuse of power. But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.
Montesquieu
If we are to judge of love by its consequences it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship.
La Rochefoucauld
Have patience with all things but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections but instantly set about remedying them-every day begin the task anew.
Saint Francis de Sales