Quotes by French Authors - Page 20

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept
Henri Cartier-Bresson
At the end of the afternoon she tore herself away from the story to go and buy some tobacco. This would be tricky on a holiday, but never mind, it was mainly a pretext so the story could settle and she'd have the pleasure of meeting up with her new friend again a bit later on.
Anna Gavalda
It is a promise which eminently deserves our observation that all who are united to Christ and acknowledge Him to be Christ and Mediator will remain to the end safe from all danger, for what is said of the body of the Church belongs to each of its members since they are one in Christ.
John Calvin
A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He does not say "My men were beaten " he says "I was beaten."
Antoine De Saint Exupery
His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.
Victor Hugo
Peace at any price.
Alphonse de Lamartine
Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.
Gaston Bachelard
Without inquiring too deeply into the causes which make it possible to find subjects of gaiety always close at hand, the proof of that possibility can be found in the fact that persons of sensitive intelligence are capable of finding comic potentialities in everything and everybody, thereby demonstrating that if some people hold the belief that there is very little that is laughable in the world, the reason is that they lack the ability to find it.
Marcel Proust
Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.
Rashi
Even as it clouds our corporeal vision, intoxication clarifies our spiritual vision. The mind, set free from the heavy bondage of the body, flees away like a prisoner whose guard has fallen asleep, leaving the keys at the prison gate.
Gérard de Nerval
Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political.
Pierre Bourdieu
Nothing is born of nothing, least of all knowledge, modernity, or enlightened thought; progress is made in tiny surges, in successive laps, like an endless relay race. But there are links without which nothing would be passed on, and for that reason, they deserve the gratitude of all who benefited from them.
Amin Maalouf
Be patient, you are in good company. Our Lord Himself, our Lady, the apostles, and countless saints, both men and women, have been poor.
Francis de Sales
Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter.
Henri Bergson
But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language.
Pierre Boulle
...he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...
Albert Camus
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.
Henri Bergson
You think of outside your room, of the streets of the town, the lonely little squares over by the station, of those winter Saturdays all alike.
Marguerite Duras
So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there.
René Descartes
Let us being again. To take some examples: why should “literature” still designate that which already breaks away from literature—away from what has always been conceived and signified under that name—or that which, not merely escaping literature, implacably destroys it? (Posed in these terms, the question would already be caught in the assurance of a certain fore-knowledge: can “what has always been conceived and signified under that name” be considered fundamentally homogeneous, univocal, or nonconflictual?) To take other examples: what historical and strategic function should henceforth be assigned to the quotation marks, whether visible or invisible, which transform this into a “book,” or which still make the deconstruction of philosophy into a “philosophical discourse”?
Jacques Derrida
At that period I paid as constant attention to the greater securing of my happiness, to enjoying and judging it, too, as I had always done for the smallest details of my acts; and what is the act of love, itself, if not a moment of passionate attention on the part of the body? Every bliss achieved is a masterpiece; the slightest error turns it awry, and it alters with one touch of doubt; any heaviness detracts from its charm, the least stupidity renders it dull. My own felicity is in no way responsible for those of my imprudences which shattered it later on; in so far as I have acted in harmony with it I have been wise. I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.
Marguerite Yourcenar
It is because the will has no power to bring about salvation that the idea of secular morality is an absurdity. What is called morality only depends on the will in what is, so to speak, its most muscular aspect. Religion on the contrary corresponds to desire, and it is desire that saves...To long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save.
Simone Weil
Each segment of the worm is directly reproduced as a whole worm, just as each cell of the American CEO can produce a new CEO.
Jean Baudrillard
No, what numbed these fields, peopled with bad dreams was not the oppressive grip of a plague but rather an ailing retreat, a sort of sad widowhood. Man had started to subdue these vacant expanses, then had grown weary of eating into it, and now even the desire to preserve what had been claimed had perished. He had established everywhere an ebb, a sorrowful withdrawal. His cuttings into the forest, which were seen at long intervals, had lost their hard edges, their distinct notches: now a thick brushwood had driven its sabbath into the broad daylight of the glades, hiding the naked trunks as high as their lowest branches.
Julien Gracq
What we mean when we say that something is "cultural" is that it is roughly similar to what we find in other members of the particular group we are considering, and unlike what we would find in members of a contrast group. This is why it is confusing to say that people share a culture, as if culture were common property. We may have strictly identical amounts of money in our respective wallets without sharing any of it!
Pascal Boyer
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
Anaïs Nin
In order to know virtue, we must acquaint ourselves with vice. Only then can we know the true measure of a man.
Marquis de Sade
Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way but must accept his lot calmly even if they roll a few more upon it.
Albert Schweitzer
Do not wish to be anything but what you are.
Saint Francis de Sales
There's nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and the love of friends.
Hilaire Belloc
L'homme qui n'a pas été anarchiste à seize ans est un imbécile. Mais c'en est un autre, s'il l'est encore à quarante.
Georges Clémenceau
I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.
Anaïs Nin
I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.
Voltaire
I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto 'to live well you must live unseen
René Descartes
A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.
Henri Matisse
Let me have a faithful account of all that concerns you; I would know everything, be it ever so unfortunate. Perhaps by mingling my sighs with yours I may make your sufferings less, for it is said that all sorrows divided are made lighter.
Héloïse d'Argenteuil
Curiosity evokes ‘concern’; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential. I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from the channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent ‘bad’ information from invading and suffocating the ‘good.’ Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings.
Michel Foucault
Egotism fears its own self.
Alexis de Tocqueville
My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.
Simone de Beauvoir
Ama bardağımın dibinde biram ılıksa, aynada koyu renkli lekeler varsa, fazlalıksam; en içten ve en katışıksız acım, ayıbalığı gibi, hem bir yığın et hem gepgeniş bir deriyle ve insanın içine dokunan ıslak, ama kötülük dolu gözlerle sürüklenip hantallaşıyorsa bu benim kabahatim mi?
Jean-Paul Sartre
Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production.
Paul Lafargue
To love one that is great is almost to be great one's self.
Madame Necker
So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!
Gustave Flaubert
Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.
Hubert Reeves
True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.
Emil M. Cioran
Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.
André Gide
Be like the bird that passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight feels them give way beneath her and yet sings knowing that she hath wings.
Victor Hugo
He wanted to know all about me and my family and especially my childhood."That's where everything starts," he'd say. "Both heaven and hell.
Céleste Albaret
I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself
Simone de Beauvoir
Continuity in everything is unpleasant.
Blaise Pascal
Equilibrium is the state of death, only chaos produces lifeThe Ancient Greeks have been driven to extinction by too much search for architectural harmony.
Stéphane Lupasco
The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.
Marcel Proust
If anyone accuses me of contradicting myself I reply: Because I have been wrong once or oftener I do not aspire to be always wrong.
Vauvenargues
If we have not peace within ourselves it is in vain to seek it from outward sources.
François de La Rochefoucauld
What we need to understand is that books weren't written so that young people could write essays about them, but so that they could read them if they really wanted to.Knowledge, academic track record, career, and social life are one thing. Our intimacy and cultural awareness as readers are quite another.
Daniel Pennac
Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections.
Saint Francis de Sales
Sometimes I don’t understand why my arms don’t drop from my body with fatigue, why my brain doesn’t melt away. I am leading an austere life, stripped of all external pleasure, and am sustained only by a kind of permanent frenzy, which sometimes makes me weep tears of impotence but never abates. I love my work with a love that is frantic and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly. Sometimes, when I am empty, when words don’t come, when I find I haven’t written a single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed, bogged down in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride that makes me pant after a chimera. A quarter of an hour later, everything has changed; my heart is pounding with joy.
Gustave Flaubert
Lust and force are the source of all our actions lust causes voluntary actions force involuntary ones.
Blaise Pascal
What we call happiness is what we do not know.
Anatole France
I felt condemned to obscurity and to celibacy. But when one is driven by passion, one can live on almost nothing, and I was driven by passion for writing. One does not starve in modern, Western societies, and one can do without such amenities as the telephone, a car, entertainment.
Alain Robbe-Grillet