Quotes by French Authors - Page 17

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Valor is stability not of legs and arms but of courage and the soul.
Michel de Montaigne
You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. Do no bother yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life clear.
Victor Hugo
Being established in my life, buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in this transcendental field which was opened for me by my first perception, and in which all absence is merely the obverse of a presence, all silence a modality of the being of sound, I enjoy a sort of ubiquity and theoretical eternity, I feel destined to move in a flow of endless life, neither the beginning nor the end of which I can experience in thought, since it is my living self who think of them, and since thus my life always precedes and survives itself.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
One of the great problems of philosophy, is the relationship between the realm of knowledge and the realm of values. Knowledge is what is; values are what ought to be. I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including Marxism have tried to derive the 'ought' from the 'is.' My point of view is that this is impossible, this is a farce.
Jacques Monod
A good memory is needed once we have lied.
Corneille
In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.
Simone de Beauvoir
In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!
Marjane Satrapi
Waiting is erotic
Irène Némirovsky
Women are perfectly well aware that the more they seem to obey the more they rule.
Jules Michelet
The earth is a great piece of stupidity.
Victor Hugo
War is the national industry of Prussia.
Mirabeau
Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
She always walked under the arches of nightsAnd everywhere she wentShe leftThe mark of broken things.
Paul Éluard
I took especially great pleasure in mathematics because of the certainty and the evidence of its arguments.
René Descartes
You're beautiful, but you're empty...One couldn't die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass, since she's the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three butterflies). Since she's the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Success causes us to be more praised than known.
Joseph Roux
I've been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.
Eric Cantona
In the midst of this utopia, which only your fellow lone voyagers would perceive, you used to transgress society’s rules unknowingly, and no one would hold you accountable for it. You would mistakenly enter private residences, go to concerts to which you had not been invited, eat at community banquets where you could only guess the community’s identity when they started giving speeches. Had you behaved like this in your own country, you would have been taken for a liar or a fool. But the improbable ways of a foreigner are accepted. Far from your home, you used to taste the pleasure of being mad without being alienated, of being an imbecile without renouncing your intelligence, of being an impostor without culpability.
Édouard Levé
In numele si sub teroarea ei (plictiselii, n.m.) parasesc oamenii caminul si moartea agreabila legata de el si se avanta in lume, spre a muri undeva fara acoperis si fara lacrimi; adolescentii se gandesc la sinucideri in zile infinite de primavara, iar servitoarele fara amanti se lamenteaza duminicile, de parca inima lor e un cimitir in care mortii nu pot dormi.
Emil M. Cioran
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges to beg in the streets and to steal bread.
Anatole France
It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at present.
Émile Durkheim
If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of man serve its own interests.
Baron D. Holbach
Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.
Georges Carpentier
I tried to believe in God, but I confess to you that God meant nothing in my life, and that in my secret heart I too felt a void where my childhood faith had been. But probably this feeling belongs only to individuals in transition. The grandchildren of these pessimists will frolic in the freedom of their lives, and have more happiness than poor Christians darkened with fear of Hell.
Voltaire
...she robbed me blind, the bitch!...and she's still at it! everyone who's ever done me wrong, robbed me, repudiated me, pillaged me has never suffered...and never will suffer! you could call it their reward!...robbing me brings you good luck!
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibilit. But again, to exist mean: 'being-in-the-world.' Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities.
Milan Kundera
The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
Jacques Barzun
Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom—ah the soul-destroying boredom—of long days of mild content.
Jean-Paul Sartre
An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.
Stendhal
Jealousy devours us, we are its dish of the day. (Jalousie nous dévore. - Nous sommes son plat du jour)
Charles de Leusse
Sometimes happiness is not knowing the whole story.
François Lelord
Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.
Anaïs Nin
Strategy is 5 percent thinking, 95 percent execution. And strategy execution is 5 percent technical, 95 percent people-related.
Professor Quy Huy INSEAD
There is nothing harder to explain than humor.
Milan Kundera
The master always keeps a piece of learning--that is to say, a piece of the student's ignorance--up his sleeve. I understood that, says the satisfied student. You think so, corrects the master. in fact, there's a difficulty here that I've been sparing you until now. We will explain it when we get to the corresponding lesson. What does this mean? asks the curious student. I could tell you, responds the master, but it would be premature: you wouldn't understand at all. It will be explained to you next year. The master is always a length ahead of the student, who always feels that in order to go farther he must have another master, supplementary explications. Thus does the triumphant Achilles drag Hector's corpse, attached to his chariot, around the city of Troy.
Jacques Rancière
Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.
Julio Cortázar
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
Jean Baudrillard
My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.
Michel de Montaigne
Of all our infirmities the most savage is to despise our being.
Michel de Montaigne
Do everything with the greatest possible calm and serenity and out of the greatest, purest and holiest love of Jesus and Mary.
Father Jacques Philippe
Listen, Monsieur Director, here's what I think. Obviously this is wrong. There are twenty-six of you in five or six small rooms; there are three of us in space enough for sixty. That is wrong, I assure you. You have my house and I am in yours. Give me back mine and this will be your home.
Victor Hugo
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
Henri Poincaré
I don't think success is harmful as so many people say. Rather I believe it indispensible to talent: if for nothing else than to increase the talent.
Jeanne Moreau
Y allá en el fondo está la muerte si no corremos y llegamos antes y comprendemos que ya no importa.
Julio Cortázar
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.
Jean Baudrillard
The same Everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you tomorrow and every day of your life. Either He will shield you from suffering, or He will give you unfailing strength to bear it. Be at peace then, and put aside all anxious thoughts.
Francis de Sales
Never think that God's delays are God's denials. Hold on hold fast hold out. Patience is genius.
Comte de Buffon
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
Roland Barthes
We are not certain we are never certain.
Albert Camus
Familialism consists of magically denying social reality, and avoiding all connections with the actual flux.
Félix Guattari
People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.
Roman Payne
The cabin will return to the soil when abandoned by its owner, yet in its simplicity it offers perfect protection against the seasonal cold without disfiguring the sheltering forest. With the yurt and the igloo, it figures among the handsomest human responses to environmental adversity.
Sylvain Tesson
The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second
Jean-Luc Godard
From all that I saw,and everywhere I wandered,I learned that time cannot be spent,It only can be squandered.
Roman Payne
One is not born a woman - one becomes one.
Simone de Beauvoir
I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me.
Marguerite Duras
The greatest thing you'll ever learn ... is just to love and be loved in return.
Moulin Rouge