Quotes by French Authors - Page 22

Sixty years is too brief a compass for man’s imagination. The incomplete joys of this world can never satisfy his heart.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
René Descartes
My life will have been a succession of lives, as if I have had several lives, a multiplicity of stories and roles. I have not ceased to have changes of life.
Bernard Stiegler
I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortiferous power: certain Communards paid with their lives for their willingness or even their eagerness to pose on the barricades: defeated, they were recognized by Thiers's police and shot, almost every one).
Roland Barthes
Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It's a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in a place where you would not have expected to find it.
Gustave Flaubert
At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
Albert Camus
The vigor I lacked for physical activities became incandescent when, pen in hand, I filled those pages with invented stories. Sometimes they were intimately about me – family tales, parental exploits – sometimes they became horrific stories sprinkled with torture, death, and reunion: crazy games and tear-soaked sagas.
Philippe Grimbert
Prayer unaccompanied by perseverance leads to no result.
John Calvin
I have an ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition. Why you will not have ambition? Why? Have the greatest ambition possible. You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it. You want to make the most fantastic art or movie? Try. If you fail, is not important. We need to try.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
If you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent them from growing.
Coco Chanel
Every situation is of man's making and can only contain what man contains.
Milan Kundera
Hold on hold fast hold out. Patience is genius.
Georges de Buffon
I think… that love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply anencounter, a trifle, you learn that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity. And you can even be tested and suffer in the process. In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that. Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potential universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit.
Alain Badiou
The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced.
Simone de Beauvoir
The mold we give to our lives is so that there will be no cataclysms. The order we seek we are willing to surrender to the flow of life at any time, but it is there as a brake on a car, and our health is a brake. We put brakes on, against our temperament. he said, “Even a room, arranged in a certain manner, prevents certain things from taking place in it.
Anaïs Nin
Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.
André Malraux
By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream
Gustave Flaubert
Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is.
Voltaire
Usually, the murmur that rises up from Paris by day is the city talking; in the night it is the city breathing; but here it is the city singing. Listen, then, to this chorus of bell-towers - diffuse over the whole the murmur of half a million people - the eternal lament of the river - the endless sighing of the wind - the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed upon the hills, in the distance, like immense organpipes - extinguish to a half light all in the central chime that would otherwise be too harsh or too shrill; and then say whetehr you know of anything in the world more rich, more joyous, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes - this furnace of music - these thousands of brazen voices, all singing together in flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than this city which is but one orchestra - this symphony which roars like a tempest.
Victor Hugo
I myself am an absolute abyss.
Antonin Artaud
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I am not afraid of a fight I have to do my duty come what may.
Therese of Lisieux
That beautiful day passed just as the saddest ones do, since the most radiant of days has a tomorrow.
Thérèse de Lisieux
This man Wellington is so stupid he does not know when he is beaten and goes on fighting.
Napoléon Bonaparte
...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.
Marguerite Duras
It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, "It's delicious!" rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn’t be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead
Gustave Flaubert
Blood was flowing – in Bluebeard’s house, in the abattoirs, in the circuses where God had set his seal to whiten the windows. Blood and Milk flowed together.
Arthur Rimbaud
There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.
Jean-Paul Sartre
One of my objectives is learning more than is absolutely necessary.
Jules Verne
... there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again.
Marcel Proust
Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.
Gilles Deleuze
An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.
Man Ray
People do not just buy products. They buy better versions of themselves. And the packages in which they want the products to be delivered must come from humble and approachable brands. People have no patience for fluff.
Cendrine Marrouat
Of all our faults the one that we excuse most easily is idleness.
La Rochefoucauld
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds it dies of weariness of withering of tarnishing.
Anaïs Nin
We are often more treacherous through weakness than calculation
François de La Rochefoucauld
Intimacy isn’t something men talk about.
Michel Houellebecq
Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.
Jacques Lacan
When I look at my life and at the secret color which it has, I feel as if tears were trembling in my heart. I am just as much the lips that I have kissed as the nights spent in the 'House before the World,' just as much the child brought up in poverty as this frenzied ambition and thirst for life which sometimes carry me away.
Albert Camus
We must not seek happiness in peace but in conflict.
Paul Claudel
God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so.
William of Conches
A single radio post still heard him. The only link between him and the world was a wave of music, a minor modulation. Not a lament, no cry, yet purest of sounds that ever spoke despair.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. They need at least a doctor who understands the disease. How can you expect Cottard to be able to treat you? He has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare.
Marcel Proust
When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
Marcel Duchamp
A wise man sees as much as he ought not as much as he can.
Michel de Montaigne
It is an aspect of all happiness to suppose that we deserve it.
Joseph Joubert
Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his neighbors taken out and shot - he could accept it all more easily than he dared to admit. But the grief implicit in Tereza's dream was something he could not endure.
Milan Kundera
A man who makes a plate or a shirt or a loaf of bread or anything our great great ancestors called a work of art, has no need to try to be sincere; all he can do is practice his craft to the best of his ability. But once he starts making useless things, how can he not be sincere?
René Daumal
Poverty has in its favour an exquisite sleep filled with beautiful dreams.
Honoré de Balzac
Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.
Albert Camus
I told myself 'Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?
Guy de Maupassant
I’ve seen knives pierce the chest,Children dying in the roadCrawling things hooked and baited,Rapists bound and then castrated,Villains singed in public square.Yet none these sights did make me cringeLike when my Love cut all her hair.
Roman Payne
The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.
Simone de Beauvoir
My tastes are aristocratic my actions democratic.
Victor Hugo
What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.
Gustave Flaubert
I do not know any reading more easy more fascinating more delightful than a catalogue.
Anatole France
He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Milan Kundera
Now, these eager and apprehensive men of small property constitute the class which is constantly increased by the equality of conditions. Hence, in democratic communities, the majority of the people do not clearly see what they have to gain by a revolution, but they continually and in a thousand ways feel that they might lose by one.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Dantes,rejected by all the world,frequently experienced a desire for solitude, and what solitude is at the same time more complete,more poetical , than that of a bark floating isolated on the sea during the obscurity of the night, in the silence of immensity and under the eye of Heaven? Now this solitude was peopled with this thoughts, the night lighted by his illusions, and the silence animated by his anticipations.
Alexandre Dumas