Quotes by French Authors - Page 13

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occa
Albert Camus
To win without risk is to triumph without glory.
Pierre Corneille
And then the great music of which the world is made took him over, beyond thought, beyond control until he heard her cry his name and they fell together off the edge of the world.
Jean Gill
Worshiping the Devil is no more insane than worshiping God...It is precisely at the moment when positivism is at its high-water mark that mysticism stirs into life and the follies of occultism begin.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness.
George Sand
I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight
Marguerite Duras
…is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change?
Jean-François Lyotard
The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.
Jean Rostand
Every day, and in every way, I am becoming better and better.
Émile Coué
I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like would have an opposite which I would like.
Coco Chanel
All men have happiness as their object: there are no exceptions. However different the means they employ they aim at the same end.
Blaise Pascal
The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.
Julio Cortázar
Nature abhors a vacuum.
François Rabelais
I still couldn’t banish the image of the Quetzal Flower. In my mind, it merged with that of Priestess Eleuia: everything a man could desire or aspire to, a woman who would suck the marrow from your bones and still leave you smiling.
Aliette de Bodard
An unbearable reality, combined with the impossibility to change it, tends to lead to abstractions for abstraction's sake, and unreality becomes more realistic than reality itself, more true, more convincing, simply because it looks at you with the eyes of justice.
Romain Gary
Yes, but I say that Nature is our enemy, that we must always fight against Nature, for she is continually bringing us back to an animal state. You may be sure that God has not put anything on this earth that is clean, pretty, elegant or accessory to our ideal; the human brain has done it.
Guy de Maupassant
Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this.
Paul Celan
I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.
Jules Renard
How could women ever have had genius when all possibility of accomplishing a work of genius - or just a work - was refused them?
Simone de Beauvoir
If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy
Milan Kundera
We are never so happy nor so unhappy as we imagine.
La Rochefoucauld
Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.
Coco Chanel
Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie.(There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.)
Michel de Montaigne
All the known world excepting only savage nations is governed by books.
Voltaire
That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
Simone de Beauvoir
They were the men and the women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They appeared as in a dream, at the crest of a dune, as if they were born of the cloudless sky.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.
Voltaire
We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it isgood-and that is the real theater-totranscend them in the manner of play, bymeans of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put "inplay," show up, transform and reversethe systems which quietly order us about.
Michel Foucault
The effectiveness of work increases according to geometrical progression if there are no interruptions.
André Maurois
No, no, don't let my vulnerable heart share in this sacrifice to lust! Let him disgust me before pleasing me! Let him be what others have been, an instrument that I can break before becoming the echoes of its vibration.
Rachilde
The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful...
Henri Bergson
Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.
André Breton
The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.
Anaïs Nin
It all seemed a hollow sham now - that strict code, that conscientious virtue that condemned her to the sterile joys of pious women! No, no, she'd had enough of that; she wanted to live!
Émile Zola
To have a solid foundation of skepticism, -that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life.
Rémy de Gourmont
It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock-market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows, money that produces more money? There are socioeconomic "complexes" that are also veritable complexes of the unconscious, and that communicate a voluptuous wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy (the military-industrial complex). And ideology, Oedipus, and the phallus have nothing to do with this, because they depend on it rather than being its impetus. For it is a matter of flows, of stocks, of breaks in and fluctuations of flows; desire is present wherever something flows and runs, carrying along with it interested subjects—but also drunken or slumbering subjects—toward lethal destinations.
Gilles Deleuze
Of all the simplifications to which the human spirit naturally inclines, unable to reconcile itself to the complexity of the real, there is none more dangerous than the attempt to integrate the whole of society in one vast, permanent action group.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.
Roland Barthes
The world will be saved by one or two people.
André Gide
You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you find absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.
Octave Mirbeau
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
Rémy de Gourmont
There is no fate which cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Albert Camus
To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.
Jean Genet
The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination.
Michel Foucault
It is better to enlighten men’s minds than to teach them to be obstinate in their prejudices.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
For the Word of God is not received by faith if it flits about in the top of the brain, but when it takes root in the depth of the heart . . . the heart's distrust is greater than the mind's blindness. It is harder for the heart to be furnished with assurance [of God's love] than for the mind to be endowed with thought.
John Calvin
I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.
Charles Baudelaire
The most thoroughly wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed.
Nicolas de Chamfort
One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least.
Voltaire
The cross of Christ only triumphs in the breast of believers over the devil and the flesh, sin and sinners, when their eyes are directed to the power of His Resurrection.
John Calvin
To recreate a new aristocracy is the eternal task of every revolutionary project.
Guillaume Faye
Joyful friends, mostly loyal, they hadn't abandoned their protector before the gathering storm; and despite the threatening sky, despite the shuddering earth, they remained, smiling, considerate, and as devoted to misfortune as they had been to prosperity.
Alexandre Dumas
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
Honoré de Balzac
He was one of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to.
Albert Camus
You too, you took an interest in the world. That was long ago. I want you to cast your mind back to then. The domain of the rules was no longer enough for you; you were unable to love any longer in the domain of the rules; so you had to enter into the domain of the struggle. I ask you to go back to that precise moment. It was long ago, no? Cast your mind back: the water was cold. You are far from the edge, now. Oh yes! How far from the edge you are! You long believed in the existence of another shore; such is no longer the case. You go on swimming, though, and every movement you make brings you closer to drowning. You are suffocating, your lungs are on fire. The water seems colder and colder to you, more and more galling. You aren't that young anymore. Now you are going to die. Don't worry. I am here. I won't let you sink. Go on with your reading.
Michel Houellebecq
They had nothing in common except for existing in the same time and space
Pascal Garnier
All for one and one for all.
Alexandre Dumas
Our history, especially that of the great religions, Christianity in particular, has given us a "hidden prejudice" in favor of the "beyond" at the expense of the "here and now" and this must be changed.(quoted from The Age of Atheists" by Peter Watson, p 25)
Luc Ferry
To err his human, to stroll is Parisian.
Victor Hugo
The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
Albert Camus