Quotes by French Authors - Page 21

I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them.
Anaïs Nin
So like a forgotten fire a childhood can always flare up again within us.
Gaston Bachelard
No one is more liable to make mistakes than the man who acts only on reflection.
Vauvenargues
I thought that there could be no revolt against nature. I accepted the landscape without dreaming that, behind, there still prowled large skeletons without fur. With just one sign, I thought I was able to make them rise up outside their refuges...
Roger Vitrac
I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.
Charles Baudelaire
It is easier to know mankind in general than man individually.
La Rochefoucauld
The public! the public! How many fools does it take to make up a public?
Sebastien Chamfort
Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
Voltaire
Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my childhood was ending in an explosion of unreal passion that made my life feel sacred and holy.
Roman Payne
Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.
Voltaire
She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:--"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you."She tried to smile once more and expired.
Victor Hugo
We are not to reflect on the wickedness of men but to look to the image of God in them, an image which, covering and obliterating their faults, an image which, by its beauty and dignity, should allure us to love and embrace them.
John Calvin
The looming storm broke in the end. And it is the storm I will remember, the sound of the downpour splattering over the steps of the Tuileries, the dark sky and the pink lightning. I could have stayed like that for centuries.
Hélène Berr
A lifetime spent in the study of the history of societies since the dawn of mankind presumably inclined him to skepticism and misgivings in regard to any great scheme, religious or political, that set out to create universal happiness in one fell swoop; what it was more likely to create, in his opinion, was universal misery; and his faith in heaven-sent saviors was hardly greater.
François Maspero
Everyone without exception is searching for happiness.
Blaise Pascal
I'm only keeping in touch with you for the sake of the children. Way to look after our son, by the way. I let you have him for the weekend and before I know it he's chained underground, awaiting Last Times and stinking of mead.
Joanne Harris
We should fix ourselves firmly in the presence of God by conversing all the time with Him...we should feed our soul with a lofty conception of God and from that derive great joy in being his. We should put life in our faith. We should give ourselves utterly to God in pure abandonment, in temporal and spiritual matters alike, and find contentment in the doing of His will,whether he takes us through sufferings or consolations.
Brother Lawrence
As long as ignorance and misery exist in the world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless
Victor Hugo
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.
Anatole France
A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.
Jacques Monod
The destruction of sight, wherever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colours are affected in the first place, and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplified, being reduced to four andsoon to two colours; finally a grey monochrome stage is reached, although the pathological colour is never identifiable with any normal one. Thus in central as in peripheral lesions ‘the loss of nervous substance results not only in a deficiency of certain qualities, but in the change to a less differentiated and more primitive structure’.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
I was a young, & had deep loves, & my heart would overflow with enthusiasm! And I mingled with the crowd, I mixed with my fellow men, speaking my thought out loud! And they gaped back at me, without understanding. And I withdrew from them, & they said to me: Arrogant one! And from time to time in my solitude, my loves, my repressed enthusiasms broke out into odes, conversation; & my companions laughed and used to point at me as a madman. So I suffered, doubted, cursed, & no one believed me sincere. It’s as if this heart, once so full of strength & love were annihilated.
Comte de Lautréamont
Music is the silence between the notes.
Claude Debussy
Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.
Michel de Montaigne
For instance, a fireman is a brave fellow! He fears nothing, least ofall fire! Well, the fireman in question, who had gone to make a roundof inspection in the cellars and who, it seems, had ventured a littlefarther than usual, suddenly reappeared on the stage, pale, scared,trembling, with his eyes starting out of his head, and practicallyfainted in the arms of the proud mother of little Jammes.[1] And why?Because he had seen coming toward him, AT THE LEVEL OF HIS HEAD, BUTWITHOUT A BODY ATTACHED TO IT, A HEAD OF FIRE! And, as I said, afireman is not afraid of fire.The fireman's name was Pampin.
Gaston Leroux
Friendship throws out deep roots in honest hearts, D'Artagnan. Believe me, it is only the evil-minded who deny friendship; they cannot understand it.
Alexandre Dumas
After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.
Jules de Goncourt
But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain.
Patrick Modiano
An effort was made to spread this new materialist atheism with its Communist consequence "by the sword" (as the metaphor goes), that is, by the invasion of neighboring countries with consequent further massacres and the extension of the area of despotic Soviet control... This armed attempt at expansion was checked by Catholic Poland, the most immediately exposed victim, in what has been called "one of the decisive battles of the world.
Hilaire Belloc
I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
Albert Camus
A weakling is incapable of sincerity.
François de La Rochefoucauld
In our springtime there is no better,there is no worse.Blossoming branches burgeon as they must.Some are long,some are short.Stay upright.Stay with life.
Cyril Pedrosa
We need to get acquainted with mediocrity to notice greatness.
Olivier Magny
In Paris, everything's for sale: wise virgins, foolish virgins, truth and lies, tears and smiles.
Émile Zola
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
Roland Barthes
Be charitable and indulgent to every one but thyself.
Joseph Joubert
I was hungry and you gave me to eat; I was cold and you clothed me; come, possess the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.' He who is the the King of the poor and of kings will say this at His great judgment.
Francis de Sales
All for one one for all.
Alexander Dumas
Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?
Gustave Flaubert
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
Joseph Joubert
We are all very much alike in France in this respect; we still remain knights, knights of love and fortune, since God has been abolished whose bodyguard we really were. But nobody can ever get woman out of our hearts; there she is, and there she will remain, and we love her, and shall continue to love her, and go on committing all kinds of follies on her account as long as there is a France on the map of Europe; and even if France were to be wiped off the map, there would always be Frenchmen left.
Guy de Maupassant
Men are alike in their promises. It is only in their deeds that they differ.
Molière
Art is vice. You don't wed it, you rape it.
Edgar Degas
Il est le soleil qui ne se couche jamais sur l'empire de la passivité moderne. Il recouvre toute la surface du monde et baigne indéfiniment dans sa propre gloire.
Guy Debord
Every day the words that Keep-on-Dancin’ and the Gypsy imparted to me - theories, observations, advice and warnings - are substantiated and acquire deeper meaning.‘It’s not for nothing there are so many bistrots in Paris,’ Keep-on-Dancin’ asserted. ‘The reason so many people are always crowded into them isn’t so much they go there to drink but to meet up, congregate, come together, comfort each other. Yes, comfort each other: people are bored the whole time, and they’re scared, scared of loneliness and boredom. And they all carry around in their heart of hearts their own pet little arch-fear: fear of death, no matter how devil-may-care they might appear to be. They’d do anything to avoid thinking about it. Don’t forget, it’s with that fear all temples and churches were built. So in cities like this, where forty different races mingle together, everyone can always find something to say to each other.
Jacques Yonnet
I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving.
Marcel Proust
Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.
Annette Messager
Success produces success just as money produces money.
Nicolas de Chamfort
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
Anaïs Nin
Howard Hughes was able to afford the luxury of madness, like a man who not only thinks he is Napoleon but hires an army to prove it.
Ted Morgan
Endless moons, an opaque universe, thunder, tornadoes, the quaking earth. Rare moments of peace; forehead up against my knees, arms around my head, I though, I listened, I longed not to exist. but life was there, a transparent pearl, a star revolving slowly on its own axis.
Shan Sa
Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.
Albert Camus
Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.
Roman Payne
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle.
Anaïs Nin
Lead us toward a speech, which is as beautiful as silence, and toward a silence, which is as beautiful as the sweetest and truest of words. (119)
Jean-Yves Leloup
Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones.
Gaston Bachelard
Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.
Albert Camus
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Voltaire
One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.
Gustave Flaubert
To succeed is nothing-it's an accident. But to feel no doubts about oneself is something very different: it is character.
Marie Leneru