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Quotes by French Authors - Page 2

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
Igor Stravinsky
Self-confidence depends on environment: one does not speak in the same tone in the drawing room than in the kitchen.
Gustave Flaubert
N'ayez jamais peur de la vie, n'ayez jamais peur de l'aventure, faites confiance au hasard, à la chance, à la destinée. Partez, allez conquérir d'autres espaces, d'autres espérances. Le reste vous sera donné de surcroît.
Henry de Monfreid
I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunder
Guy de Maupassant
To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,--while society fraternity is based on resemblances.The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul, -and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which Andre Gide belongs.The misfortune of these beings, when they express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob consents to admit such souls, it is as curiosities or museum objects. Their glory is, finally, to be loved from afar & almost understood, as parchments are seen & read above sealed cases.
Rémy de Gourmont
The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labour but the result of organised, protected robbery. Rich people are no longer respectable people; they are nothing more than flesh eating animals, jackals and vultures which wallow in the people's blood.
Frantz Fanon
Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom
Gustave Flaubert
I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars
Simone de Beauvoir
religion is no longer the opium of the people but the vitamin pills of the feeble.
Régis Debray
Do not wish to be anything but what you are and try to be that perfectly.
St. Francis de Sales
One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.
Albert Camus
We say: mad with joy. We should say: wise with grief.
Marguerite Yourcenar
From the intellectual point of view an abyss may exist between a great mathematician and his boot maker, but from the point of view of character the difference is most often slight or non-existent
Gustave Le Bon
Ignorance is the necessary condition, i do not say of happiness, but of life itself. If we knew everything, we could not endure existence a single hour. The sentiments that make it sweet to us, or at any rate tolerable, spring from a falsehood, and are fed on illusions.If, like God, a man possessed the truth, the sole and perfect truth, and once let it escape out of his hands, the world would be annihilated there and then, and the universe melt away instantly like a shadow.
Anatole France
I want to be famous but unknown!
Edgar Degas
In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome stubbornness is stupid.
Simone de Beauvoir
He who prays and labours lifts his heart to God with his hands.
Saint Bernard
Where would we be in this soulless universe if there weren't a few people who hold on to memories, their hearts yearning for long-lost feelings?
Nicolas Barreau
Ye sons of France awake to glory! Hark! Hark! what myriads bid you rise! Your children wives and grandsires hoary Behold their tears and hear their cries!
Rouget de Lisle
I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.
Anaïs Nin
It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory
Victor Hugo
Mais, j’aurai beau supplier, j’aurai beau me révolter, il n’y aura plus rien pour moi ; je ne serai, désormais, ni heureux, ni malheureux. Je ne peux pas ressusciter. Je vieillirai aussi tranquille que je le suis aujourd’hui dans cette chambre où tant d’êtres ont laissé leur trace, où aucun être n’a laissé la sienne.Cette chambre, on la retrouve à chaque pas. C’est la chambre de tout le monde. On croit qu’elle est fermée, non : elle est ouverte aux quatre vents de l’espace. Elle est perdue au milieu des chambres semblables, comme de la lumière dans le ciel, comme un jour dans les jours, comme moi partout.Moi, moi ! Je ne vois plus maintenant que la pâleur de ma figure, aux orbites profondes, enterrée dans le soir, et ma bouche pleine d’un silence qui doucement, mais sûrement, m’étouffe et m’anéantit.Je me soulève sur mon coude comme sur un moignon d’aile. Je voudrais qu’il m’arrivât quelque chose d’infini !
Henri Barbusse
Consciousness reigns but doesn't govern.
Paul Valéry
Few of us would regret the years it takes to complete an education or master a crucial skill. So why complain about the perseverance needed to become a well-balanced and truly compassionate human being?
Matthieu Ricard
A very special case. A few years more, and that pretty creature who you love too much, I think, will, without ever loving them, have known as many men as there are beads on her aunt's rosary. No happy medium! Either a nun or a monster! God's bosom or sensual passions! It would, perhaps, be better to put her in a convent, since we put hysterical women in the Saltpetriere! She does not know vice, she invents it!"That was ten years ago before the day our story begins and... Raoule was not a nun.
Rachilde
If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God and a coward towards men.
Michel de Montaigne
Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,-Wait and hope.
Alexandre Dumas
The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.
Stendhal
Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.
Anaïs Nin
A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.
Marcel Proust
If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.
Gustave Flaubert
In the letters section, a Scot reminds his readers of the ‘Glorious Alliance’ between France and Mary Queen of Scots, which explains why Scotland should not share the rabid Europhobia of Englishmen.
Bruno Latour
Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Our life is like some vast lake that is slowly filling with the stream of our years. As the waters creep surely upward the landmarks of the past are one by one submerged. But there shall always be memory to lift its head above the tide until the lake is overflowing.
Alexandre Charles Auguste Bisson
We 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. We cannot develop and print a memory.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.
Talleyrand
that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching to seek pleasure elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth.
Marcel Proust
We are more severe judges of our own acts... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.
Anaïs Nin
I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals.
Brigitte Bardot
We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Pardon me if, reading that, I want to laugh, because you want to relieve me of a fear I've never had. I've never thought that, as they say, you eat little children.
Jeanne D'Albret
What distresses us is not loosing life, but losing what gives it meaning.
Raymond Radiguet
An attentive reader will always learn more, and more quickly, from good authors than from life.
Hervé Le Tellier
You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
What is perfectly true is perfectly witty.
La Rochefoucauld
In my youth poverty enriched me but now I can afford wealth.
Marc Chagall
He thought: that's certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That's how it happens that one fine day a person joins the tramps and turns into one of them.
Milan Kundera
Real lives have no end. Real books have no end.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
A star shoots bleeding across the skyline, a companion to the black wind. Silence comes sweeping across everything.
Joë Bousquet
I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you’re a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you’re a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie.
Jean Rouch
Imagination governs the world.
Napoléon Bonaparte
We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.
Bernard Kouchner
Men are stupid and ignorant. That is why they suffer. Instead of thinking, they believe all that they are told, all that they are taught. They choose their lords and masters without judging them, with a fatal taste for slavery.
Gabriel Chevallier
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
Anaïs Nin
If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.")
Voltaire
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
Voltaire
...if the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror. Virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompts, severe, inflexible. It is there an emanation of virtue. It is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs...is force made only to protect crime? And is the thunderbolt not destined to strike the heads of the proud?... Are the enemies within not the allies of the enemies without?...
Maximillian Robespierre
The same is true of stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But [the extermination of proper place names] (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a 'suspended symbolic order.' The habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, no, here 'there isn't any place special, except for my own home, that's all...There isn't anything.' Nothing 'special': nothing that is marked, opened up by a memory or a story, signed by something or someone else. Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only 'places in which one can no longer believe in anything.
Michel de Certeau
certain details, somewhat curtailed, live in my memory. But I don't see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.
Jean-Paul Sartre
There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection.
Anaïs Nin
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