Quotes by French Authors - Page 14

That night I think we were trying to fight against death, against boredom and banality, against everything that made us cry and stare at our futures full in the face with dread. We drank and played games to be in the now, to be in each moment as hard as we could, because the moment was all that mattered, at the end of it all. I remember I felt intoxicated on life and darkness. I felt powerful. It was the most natural thing in the world. This was why we were alive– to be powerful and free.
Laure Eve
Life in society is when everyone is there and no one is present. Life in society is when everyone obeys what no one wants. Writing is a way of escaping this impoverishment, a variation on solitude like love or gambling – a principle of insubordination, a virtue of childhood.
Christian Bobin
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form - or else it is not art.
Jacques Barzun
From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.
Georges Perec
I made this [letter] very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal
A word and everything is saved.A word and all is lost.
André Breton
plantitIt will sproutBut forget about the rustic festivitiesFor the explosive word falls harmlessly eternal throughthe compact generations
Jean Cocteau
At the fourth, the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value, there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions, occupying all interstices, without reference to anything whatsoever, by virtue of pure contiguity. At the fractal stage there is no longer any equivalence, whether natural or general. Properly speaking there is now no law of value, merely a sort of epidemic of value, a sort of general metastasis of value, a haphazard proliferation and dispersal of value. Indeed, we should really no longer speak of 'value' at all, for this kind of propagation or chain reaction makes all valuation possible.
Jean Baudrillard
One felt that in her renunciation of life she had deliberately abandoned those places in which she might at least have been able to see the man she loved, for others where he had never trod.
Marcel Proust
I say, "it seemed to me," for from the depths of my past childhood, there now awoke in me the glimmerings of a thousand lost sensations. The fact that I was once more aware of my senses enabled me to give them a half fearful recognition. Yes; my reawakened senses now remembered a whole ancient history of their own— recomposed for themselves a vanished past. They were alive! Alive! They had never ceased to live; they discovered that even during those early studious years they had been living their own latent, cunning life.
André Gide
Sometimes when one person is missing the whole world seems depopulated.
Alphonse de Lamartine
[A] person whose head is bowed and whose eyes are heavy cannot look at the light.
Christine de Pizan
I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless.
Albert Camus
The test of a preacher is that his congregation goes away saying not What a lovely sermon but I will do something!
St. Francis de Sales
We should expect the best and the worst from mankind as from the weather.
Vauvenargues
It is not always the magnitude of the differences observed between species that must determine specific distinctions, but the constant preservation of those differences in reproduction.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.
Rémy de Gourmont
I wonder,” he said, “whether the stars are set alight in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own again...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Don't you think, that there are very few men who know, without raising their voice or changing their tone, to say...what has to be said?
Colette
The word 'love,' used in connection with the reproduction of our species, is the most odious blasphemy taught in our times.
Honoré de Balzac
It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
Gustave Flaubert
At the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of Heaven fills those who are quitting the light of Earth.
Victor Hugo
10 persons who speak make more noise than 10 000 who are silent.
Napoléon Bonaparte
When I am dead I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet but his books were read.'
Hilaire Belloc
Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?' again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. 'It's intolerable you know
Simone de Beauvoir
Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.
Jean-Paul Sartre
And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.
Gustave Flaubert
When we pray we link ourselves with an inexhaustible motive power.
Dr. Alexis Carrel
I've swallowed fish-eyes wholelike an endoscope.I once ate a trout cooked inside a dolphin. Felt like a shark eating another shark,inside the cold-blooded womb of yet another shark.
Yann Rousselot
It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down." -Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 76
Milan Kundera
The festivity had reached that apogee of joy when you face the happy fate of being crushed to death.
Émile Zola
Vivi muito tempo no mundo das pessoas grandes. Vi-as de bem perto.Não fiquei com muito melhor opinião delas.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Once upon a time there was a great queen who, having given birth to twin daughters, invited twelve fairies who lived nearby to come and bestow gifts upon them, as was the custom in those days. Indeed, it was a very useful custom, for the power of the fairies generally compensated for the deficiencies of nature. Sometimes, however, they also spoiled what nature had done its best to make perfect, as we shall soon see.("Green Serpent")
Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy
I have realized that we all have plague, and I have lost my peace. And today I am still trying to find it; still trying to understand all those others and not to be the enemy of anyone. I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken, and that's the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. This, and only this, can bring relief to men and, if not save them, at least do them the least harm possible and even, sometimes, a little good.
Albert Camus
O Holy Spirit, give me a simple heart which will not retire within itself to savor its own sorrows, a heart magnanimous in giving itself, easily moved to compassion, a faithful, generous heart, which does not forget any favor received nor hold resentment for any injuries done to it.
Leonce de Grandmaison
Now, I'm not going to deny that I was aware of your beauty. But the point is, this has nothing to do with your beauty. As I got to know you, I began to realise that beauty was the least of your qualities. I became fascinated by your goodness. I was drawn in by it. I didn't understand what was happening to me. And it was only when I began to feel actual, physical pain every time you left the room that it finally dawned on me: I was in love, for the first time in my life. I knew it was hopeless, but that didn't matter to me. And it's not that I want to have you. All I want is to deserve you. Tell me what to do. Show me how to behave. I'll do anything you say.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Horse[Man you will find herea new representation of the universeat its most poetic and most modernMan man man man man manGive yourself up to this art where the sublimedoes not exclude charmand brilliancy does not blur the nuanceit is now or never the momentto be sensitive to poetry for it dominatesall dreadfullyGuillaume Apollinaire]
Guillaume Apollinaire
In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.
Jacques Barzun
I admit that I myself am far from having a complete command of every topic I touch on, but my knowledge of my subject is always greater than the interest or the understanding of my auditors. You see, there is one very good thing about mankind; the mediocre masses make very few demands of the mediocrities of a higher order, submitting stupidly and cheerfully to their guidance
Alfred de Vigny
Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called “normal” functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way?
Jacques Derrida
People where you live," the little prince said, "grow five thousand roses in one garden... yet they don't find what they're looking for...They don't find it," I answered.And yet what they're looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water..."Of course," I answered.And the little prince added, "But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Does a rake deserve to possess anything of worth, since he chases everything in skirts and then imagines he can successfully hide his shame by slandering [women in general]?
Christine de Pizan
One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men haveno more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at theshops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and somen have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me. . .
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I go, I go away, I walk, I wander, and everywhere I go I bear my shell with me, I remain at home in my room, among my books, I do not approach an inch nearer to Marrakech or Timbuktu. Even if I took a train, a boat, or a motor-bus, if I went to Morocco for my holiday, if I suddenly arrived at Marrakech, I should be always in my room, at home. And if I walked in the squares and in the sooks, if I gripped an Arab's shoulder, to feel Marrakech in his person - well, that Arab would be at Marrakech, not I : I should still be seated in my room, placid and meditative as is my chosen life, two thousand miles away from the Moroccan and his burnoose. In my room. Forever.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The spirits of the brain are directly connected to the testicles. This is why men who weary their imagination in books are less suitable for procreative functions...
Louis de la Forge
But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .
Emil M. Cioran
A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with cleanunderwear—instead of being allowed to pursue something higher —stores up greatreserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over theirbooks. (...) The difference between the universitygraduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in theextent of vitality and self-confidence. The elan with which Tereza flung herself into hernew Prague existence was both frenzied and precarious. She seemed to be expectingsomeone to come up to her any day and say, What are you doing here? Go back whereyou belong!
Milan Kundera
Nothing weighs on us so heavily as a secret.
Jean de La Fontaine
Childhood memories surge back more vividly midway through life – like some palimpsest whose original text suddenly reappears after the manuscript has been chemically treated.
Gérard de Nerval
Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?
Julia Kristeva
(Regarding the Roosevelt Tram along Queensboro Bridge):"They had it renovated by the French. French cars. French cables. Cables that surrender! Would you ride in a tram that surrenders? I sure as hell wouldn't!
Camilla Monk
The man who can own up to his error is greater than he who merely knows how to avoid making it.
Cardinal de Retz
And like an aviator who rolls painfully along the ground until, abruptly, he breaks away from it, I felt myself being slowly lifted towards the silent peaks of memory.
Marcel Proust
Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence
Albert Camus
I really admire people who don’t need to live surrounded by lots of stuff. My bedroom is piled up with clothes and books, papers and photographs. I like to collect things, anything I can grab from wherever I’m travelling. I think it’s the sign of slight anxiety to always want something around you to represent a good moment you had, to hang on to the leftovers. But then they’re a pleasure to look at too, so it’s not all negative.
Isabelle Huppert
The imagination serves us only when the mind is absolutely free of any prejudice. A single prejudice suffices to cool off the imagination. This whimsical part of the mind is so unbridled as to be uncontrollable. Its greatest triumphs, its most eminent delights consist in smashing all the restraints that oppose it. Imagination is the enemy of all norms, the idolater of all disorder and of all that bears the color of crime.
Marquis de Sade
Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.
Georges Bernanos
Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means a complexity of words movements gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.
Eugène Ionesco
Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their authors. We know everything about the former, or at least as much as we are meant to know, everything that is written about a given character in a novel, a story or a poem in which she or he figures...The rest doesn't matter. Nothing is hidden from us. For us, a novel's characters are real. (p. 80
Jacques Bonnet
Once someone asked, when I was present, what constituted the greatest pleasure in love. Someone replied, naturally: in receiving. Another: in giving. Someone said: the pleasure of pride! someone else: the ecstasy of humility! All these muckers making like the Imitation of Christ. Finally, an impudent utopian was found who insisted that the greatest pleasure of love was in forming new citizens for the fatherland. Me, I said: what is uniquely, supremely voluptuous about love lies in the certainty of doing evil.
Charles Baudelaire