Quotes by French Authors - Page 16

Let a man in a garret burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.
Frédéric Bastiat
The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.
Albert Camus
Being unhappy alone isn't all that much fun, but what's even tougher is playing one's part without forgetting one's lines, coping with other people's compassion, their comments, being there with the right line when they give the cue.
François Maspero
But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart.
Gustave Flaubert
People grieve in different ways, some silently, some in anger, some in spite. Rarely does grief bring out the best in people, despite what local historians like to tell you.
Joanne Harris
The book in my hands became my trusted companion. What was written there had so much power that it forced me to stop avoiding myself, to make my own choices as well. And through some sort of vital intuition, I understood that I had a long way to go, that it would bring about a profound transformation within me, even though I could not determine it's essence, or its scope. In that book there was a voice, and behind that voice threw was an intelligence that sought to establish contact with me. It was not merely the company of written words that distiller my boredom. It was a living voice, speaking. To me.
Ingrid Betancourt
Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, all this hurly-burly in my head existed for nobody.
Simone de Beauvoir
The champions of liberty have the medal for any necklace. (Les champions de la liberte - Ont la médaille pour tout collier)
Charles de Leusse
I have indeed lived and worked to my taste either in art or science. What more could a man desire? Knowledge has always been my goal. There is much that I shall leave behind undone…but something at least I was privileged to leave for the world to use, if it so intends…As the Latin poet said I will leave the table of the living like a guest who has eaten his fill. Yes, if I had another life to spend, I certainly would not waste it. But that cannot be, so why complain?
Léon Camille Marius Croizat
... Desire baffles knowledge and power.
Jean-François Lyotard
To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only of a single man, were it only of the most infamous of men, would be to swallow up all epics in a superior and final epic. The conscience is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts and of temptations, the furnace of dreams, the cave of the ideas which are our shame; it is the pandemonium of sophisms, the battlefield of the passions. At certain hours, penetrate within the livid face of a human being who reflects, and look at what lies behind; look into that soul, look into that obscurity. There, beneath the external silence, there are combats of giants as in Homer, mêlées of dragons and hydras, and clouds of phantoms as in Milton, ghostly labyrinths as in Dante. What a gloom enwraps that infinite which each man bears within himself, and by which he measures in despair the desires of his will, and the actions of his life!
Victor Hugo
Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.
Claude Monet
The first step my son which one makes in the world is the one on which depends the rest of our days.
Voltaire
Death is the only serious preoccupation in life.
Alexandre Dumas
A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.
Guy Sajer
Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
Stendhal
Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?
Charles Baudelaire
Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should? ­
Henri Cartier-Bresson
It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.
Colette
Without pleasure man would live like a fool and soon die.
Pierre de Beaumarchais
In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force
Frantz Fanon
Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I’ve no regrets.
Roman Payne
The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.
Hélène Cixous
Hunger justifies the middle classes.
Julien Torma
Men argue. Nature acts.
Voltaire
Take an eye for an eye, turn your heart into stone, this all I have lived for, this all I have known.
Les Miserables
One cannot answer for his courage when he has never been in danger.
François de La Rochefoucauld
One should stick to the sort of thing for which one was made I tried to be an herbalist whereas I should keep to the butcher's trade.
Jean de La Fontaine
Hitler not from a woman is born, but from the men bitterness.(Hitler n'est pas né d'une femme, - Mais de l'amertume des hommes)
Charles de Leusse
Toleration is the best religion.
Victor Hugo
No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.
François de La Rochefoucauld
In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.
Jacques Lacan
What a pessimist you are!" exclaimed Candide."That is because I know what life is," said Martin.
Voltaire
You see, the thing about working with pirates is that they know what they are doing. They already know more than you do because they are sailing and raiding. They are the experts in your organization, and you need to get them on your side, not turn them against you. Here is how to deal with a pirate ship model in ten simple steps: 1. Respect the pirates. (They know how to execute.) 2. Invite the pirates to the table. Recognize their wins. 3. Ask the pirates to report on what they see and hear. 4. Ask the pirates to report on their wins and losses. 5. Ask the pirates how you can help them win more....
Olivier J. Blanchard
The air around you is filled with floating atoms, sliding down the Earth's spacetime curve. Atoms first assembled in the cores of long-dead stars. Atoms within you, everywhere, disintegrating in radioactive decays. Beneath your feet, the floor - whose electrons refuse to let yours pass, thus making you able to stand and walk and run. Earth, your planet, a lump of matter made out of the three quantum fields known to mankind, held together by gravity, the so-called fourth force (even though it isn't a force), floating within and through spacetime.
Christophe Galfard
Limited in his nature infinite in his desires man is a fallen god who remembers heaven.
Alphonse de Lamartine
It takes immense genius to represent simply and sincerely what we see in front of us.
Edmond Duranty
Some elements appear in this picture which would be decisive in Klimt's subsequent work: for instance, the use of gold and the transformation of anatomy into ornamentation, of ornamentation into anatomy.
Gilles Néret
It was at times like this that one of those waves of bestiality ran through the mine, the sudden lust of the male that came over a miner when he met one of these girls on all fours, with her rear in the air and her buttocks busting out of her breeches.
Émile Zola
I saw this moment as attached by threads to eternity and woven between all the other braided moments of my past and my future.
Roman Payne
Certainly, I approve of political opinions, but there are people who do not know where to stop.
Victor Hugo
A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists. If death does take him, he is probably unaware of the fact; it amounts to no more for him than a shock or a spasm.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.
Albert Schweitzer
This land on which so many centuries have left their mark is merely an obligatory retreat for you, whereas it has always been our dearest hope. Your too sudden passion is made up of spite and necessity.
Albert Camus
There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration.
Blaise Pascal
... Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart.
Marcel Proust
I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin
Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives--all bear secret relations to our destinies.
Francois Rene De Chateaubriand
Of all the passions fear weakens judgment most.
Cardinal de Retz
Ne dites pas trop de mal de vous-meme: on vous croirait. - Don't talk too badly of yourself: they ight believe you.
André Maurois
It will not be any European statesman who will unite Europe: Europe will be united by the Chinese.
Charles de Gaulle
Although it was only six o'clock, the night was already dark. The fog, made thicker by its proximity to the Seine, blurred every detail with its ragged veils, punctured at various distances by the reddish glow of lanterns and bars of light escaping from illuminated windows. The road was soaked with rain and glittered under the street-lamps, like a lake reflecting strings of lights. A bitter wind, heavy with icy particles, whipped at my face, its howling forming the high notes of a symphony whose bass was played by swollen waves crashing into the piers of the bridges below. The evening lacked none of winter's rough poetry.
Théophile Gautier
My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.
Robert Bresson
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. ButSisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He tooconcludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neithersterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain,in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man'sheart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy
Albert Camus
We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one
Voltaire
As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.
Victor Hugo
Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact
Henri Cartier-Bresson