Quotes by French Authors - Page 15

Happiness is a beautiful fruit that tastes of cruelty.
Agnes Varda
Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.
Milan Kundera
given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and a woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog...It is a completely selfless love.
Milan Kundera
When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory
Marcel Proust
I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.
Antonin Artaud
...the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity—that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. Now, this is basically incompatible with virtually all the religious or metaphysical systems whatever, all of which try to show that there is some sort of harmony between man and the universe and that man is a product—predictable if not indispensable—of the evolution of the universe.
Jacques Monod
How tolerable misfortunes appear when they affect only other people! How strong the human body seems when it's another man's flesh that bleeds! How easy it is to look death in the face when it's another man's turn!
Irène Némirovsky
On peut chercher dans Dieu le complice et l'ami qui manquent toujours. Dieu est l'éternel confident dans cette tragédie dont chacun est le héros.
Charles Baudelaire
I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves ofhuman mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whosedams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity theChristian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict oflife embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined bythe consoling beacons of ancient faith.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.
Anatole France
How would I explain to him that I couldn’t make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him?
Milan Kundera
I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is.
Eugène Ionesco
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
Albert Camus
A book is a suicide postponed.
Emil M. Cioran
Life is worth more than man will ever know. Each of our choices open up the possibility of a different world. Every time we wake up, the universe puts itself in our hands. So many paths. So many choices. Our discernment is the only way to tell which one leads to happiness.
Thierry Cohen
Reading is an act of resistance. Against what? Against all constraints.
Daniel Pennac
People quickly grow accustomed to being the slaves of mystery.
Guillaume Apollinaire
Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.
Pierre Bourdieu
Oh, Mercédès, I have spoken your name with sighs of melancholy, with groans of pain and with the croak of despair. I have spoken it frozen with cold, huddled on the straw of my dungeon. I have spoken it raging with heat and rolling around on the stone floor of my prison. Mercédès, I must have my revenge, because for fourteen years I suffered, fourteen years I wept and cursed. Now, I say to you, Mercédès, I must have my revenge!
Alexandre Dumas
A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men.
Georges F. Doriot
Whatever is enforced by command is more imputed to him who exacts than to him who performs.
Michel de Montaigne
If you want people to think well of you do not speak well of yourself.
Blaise Pascal
To achieve great things, we must live as though we were never going to die.
Luc de Clapiers de Vauvenargues
A woman with good shoes i never ugly!
Coco Chanel
The kingdoms of kings are confined, either by mountains or rivers, or by a change in customs or by a difference of language; but my kingdom is as great as the world, because I am neither Italian, nor French, nor Hindu, nor American, nor a Spaniard; I am a cosmopolitan. No country can claim to be my birthplace, God alone knows in which region I shall die. I adopt every custom, I speak every tongue [... ] In this way, you see, being of no country, asking for the protection of no goverment and acknowledging no man as my brother, I am not restrained or hampered by a single one of the scruples that tie the hands of the powerful or the obstacles that block the path of the weak.
Alexandre Dumas
Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him.
Charles Fourier
[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.
Antonin Artaud
Nature loves death: she will not punish it.
Guy de Maupassant
And to every man has been assigned a good and an evil angel; one assisting him and the other annoying him, from his cradle to his coffin.
Voltaire
And the thing has been said and said well have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
Anatole France
When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong-- or absolutely right.
Albert Guinon
To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place -- an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City...a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.
Michel de Certeau
For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.
Albert Camus
Faced with crisis the man of character falls back on himself.
Charles de Gaulle
You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded. Your suicide was scandalously beautiful…You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void. We shall have to wait for death before we can know what it is that you found. Or before leaving off knowing anything at all, if it is to be silence and emptiness that awaits us.
Édouard Levé
There are temptations more attractive than angels. Liberty, Patriotism, the good of humanity – words like that are the silver scales of the Tempter’s flaming wings
Alfred de Musset
Once you hear the details of victory it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
Charles Baudelaire
Give me a man with a good allowance of nose ... when I want any good head-work done I choose a man - provided his education has been suitable - with a long nose.
Napoleon
Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
Simone Weil
The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind . . . From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.
Georges Bataille
We passed from laughter to terror which, like love and hate, are close relatives.
Lise Deharme
It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr.
Napoléon Bonaparte
You are to be pitied more than I, perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of the angels; for, as you have said, my place is not in your narrow sphere. You have the earth, I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid Ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep.
Herculine Barbin
I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.
Anaïs Nin
All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning -- not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.
Michel Foucault
She had spears of straw and grass in her hair, not like Ophelia gone mad through contact with Hamlet's madness, but because she had slept in some stable loft.
Victor Hugo
It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions.
Voltaire
For if we see that the sun, in sending forth its rays upon the earth, to generate, cherish, and invigorate its offspring, in a manner transfuses its substance into it, why should the radiance of the Spirit be less in conveying to us the communion of his flesh and blood? Wherefore the Scripture, when it speaks of our participation with Christ, refers its whole efficacy to the Spirit. Instead of many, one passage will suffice. Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans (Rom. 8:9-11), shows that the only way in which Christ dwells in us is by his Spirit. By this, however, he does not take away that communion of flesh and blood of which we now speak, but shows that it is owing to the Spirit alone that we possess Christ wholly, and have him abiding in us.
John Calvin
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
Simone de Beauvoir
Life is no more than the repeated fulfilling of a permanent desire.
Alexandre Dumas
Thus the perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite, that is, my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself. For how would I understand that I doubt and that I desire, that is, that I lack something and that I am not wholly perfect, unless there were some idea in me of a more perfect being, by comparison with which I might recognize my defects?
René Descartes
Holiness consists simply in doing God's will, and being just what God wants us to be.
Thérèse de Lisieux
A woman is human, obviously, but she represents a slightly different kind of humanity.
Michel Houellebecq
He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!
Milan Kundera
Faith consists not in ignorance but in knowledge and that not only of God but also of the divine will.
John Calvin
WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.There is my desert.
Edmond Jabès
The effort of explaining, even of expressing himself, had become, with the years, more and more terrifying to him. Whether from laziness or from inability to find the right words, he had developed almost a passion for silence.
François Mauriac
...a redoubtable alchemy was at work behind impenetrable veils as the forest prepared its nocturnal mysteries.
Julien Gracq