Quotes by French Authors - Page 25

We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
Fear could never make a virtue.
Voltaire
All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.
Joseph Joubert
You see, the strangeness of my case is that now I no longer fear the invisible, I’m terrified by reality.
Jean Lorrain
Chance makes our parents but choice makes our friends.
Jacques Delille
Symptoms then are in reality nothing but the cry from suffering organs.
Jean-Martin Charcot
Long only for what you have.
André Gide
Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it.
Maurice Chevalier
I don’t understand why you insist on calling yourselves Three Little Piglettes,” Mum groans. “It’s a horrible name.”“We’ll make it beautiful, you’ll see. Or better, we’ll make it powerful.
Clémentine Beauvais
One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life and that leap is the most difficult to make-to part with one's faith one's love when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.
Anaïs Nin
8 April 1891The obscenity of nostrils and mouths; the ignominious cupidity of smiles and women encountered in the street; the shifty baseness on every side, as of hyenas and wild beasts ready to bite: tradesmen in their shops and strollers on their pavements. How long must I suffer this? I have suffered it before, as a child, when, descending by chance to the servant's quarters, I overheard in astonishment their vile gossip, tearing up my own kind with their lovely teeth.This hostility to the entire race, this muted detestation of lynxes in human form, I must have rediscovered it later while at school. I had a repugnance and horror for all base instincts, but am I not myself instinctively violent and lewd, murderous and sensual? Am I any different, in essence, from the members of the riotous and murderous mob of a hundred years ago, who hurled the town sergeants into the Seine and cried, 'String up the aristos!' just as they shout 'Down with the army!' or 'Death to the Jews!
Jean Lorrain
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
Georges Bataille
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
Milan Kundera
And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person's eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors.
Milan Kundera
Just is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent an is afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by boors and 'bounders' that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated. Three-fourths of the mental ingenuity displayed, of the social falsehoods scattered broadcast ever since the world began by people whose importance they have served only to diminish, have been aimed at inferiors.
Marcel Proust
I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
Françoise Sagan
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
Stendhal
I look at what I have not and think myself unhappy others look at what I have and think me happy.
Joseph Roux
The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.
Jean-Paul Kauffmann
Why, there's the air, the sky, the morning, the evening, moonlight, my friends, women, the beautiful architecture of Paris to study, three big books to write and all sorts of other things. Anaxagoras used to say that he was in the world in order to admire the sun. And then I have the good fortune to be able to spend my days from morning to night in the company of a man of genius - myself - and it's very pleasant.
Victor Hugo
The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe. The forthcoming euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times. It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence. Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve.
René Girard
A revolution is an idea, taken up by bayonets.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Now I could appreciate the merits of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of Mars, Venus, Saturn to planets which have nothing mythological about them. We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the gap.
Marcel Proust
Common sense is in spite of, not the result of, education.
Victor Hugo
I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I have just awoken, having dreamed of music. The final chord fades away within me while I try to focus on individuals amid the living, breathing mass packed into this vast waiting room, in this mixture of sleep and weariness.
Andreï Makine
Women have a passion for mathematics. They divide their age in half, double the price of their clothes, and always add at least five years to the age of their best friend.
Marcel Achard
Who can believe that there is no soul behind those luminous eyes?
Théophile Gautier
The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.
Julia Kristeva
It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory and in creative action that man finds his supreme joy.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Body is morning dew that shines to the rise of the hands. (Corps est rosée du matin - Qui brille au lever des mains.)
Charles de Leusse
A truly virtuous man would come to the aid of the most distant stranger as quickly as to his own friend. If men were perfectly virtuous, they wouldn’t have friends.
Montesquieu
although we very clearly see the sun, we ought not therefore to determine that it is only of the size which our sense of sight presents; and we may very distinctly imagine the head of a lion joined to the body of a goat, without being therefore shut up to the conclusion that a chimaera exists; for it is not a dictate of reason that what we thus see or imagine is in reality existent; but it plainly tells us that all our ideas or notions contain in them some truth.
René Descartes
She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her... I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them by heart; then, finding sufficient sustenance in their rhythm and reveling in them at leisure, I closed the book and remained, trembling, more alive than I had thought possible, my mind numb with happiness.
André Gide
It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.
Michel Foucault
The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.
Stendhal
These two beings, who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so touching a love, and who had lived so long for each other, were now suffering beside one another and through one another; without speaking of it, without harsh feeling, and smiling all the while.
Victor Hugo
Eloquence.— We need both what is pleasing and what is real, but that which pleases must itself be drawn from the true.
Blaise Pascal
Who worries for dying? If I close my eyes tonight, I will either dream, or not, or my eyes will open and I will be here again. And if none of those happen, and I do not wake? Who worries for dying?
Roman Payne
A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch's crown.
Victor Hugo
In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her. And 50, at an age when it would appear - since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective pleasure - that the taste for feminine beauty must play the larger part in its procreation, love may come into being, love of the most physical order, without any foundation in desire. At this time of life a man has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before his passive and astonished heart. We come to its aid; we falsify it by memory and by suggestion; recognising one of its symptoms we recall and recreate the rest.
Marcel Proust
If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind.
Émilie Du Châtelet
Hardly anyone knows how much is gained by ignoring the future.
Bernard de Fontenelle
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
Roland Barthes
Audacity has made kings.
Prosper Jolyot de Crebillion
Let's say I have a mystical soul and a rational brain, and, like Montaigne, I am incapable of choosing between them. I don't know if I believe in God, but I am often tempted to believe.
François Mitterrand
Stars are cracks of light for night than pierces the heart. (Étoiles sont fissures de lumière - De la nuit que transperce le cœur.)
Charles de Leusse
People will continue to commit atrocities as long as they believe in absurdities.
Voltaire
A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were.
Jean de La Bruyère
You know, the immortality of the soul, free will and all that -- it's all very amusing to talk about up to the age of twenty-two, but not after that. Then one ought to be giving one's mind to having fun without catching the pox, arranging one's life as comfortably as possible, having a few decent drawings on the wall, and above all writing well. That's the important thing: well-made sentences...and then a few metaphors. Yes, a few metaphors. They embellish a man's existence.
Théophile Gautier
I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
Charles de Gaulle
Diplomats are useful only in fair weather. As soon as it rains they drown in every drop.
Charles de Gaulle
Our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality, the racist commiseration.
Jean Baudrillard
He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.
Voltaire
she gives birth in pain, she heals males' wounds, she nurses the newborn and buries the dead; of man she knows all that offends his pride and humiliates his will. While inclining before him and submitting flesh to spirit, she remains on the carnal borders of the spirit; and she contests the sharpness of hard masculine architecture by softening the angles; she introduces free luxury and unforeseen grace.
Simone de Beauvoir
I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.
Anaïs Nin
Common right is nought but the protection of all radiating over the right of each. This protection of all is termed Fraternity. The point of intersection of all these aggregated sovereignties is called Society. This intersection being a junction, this point is a knot. Hence comes what is called the social tie.
Victor Hugo
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.
Blaise Pascal
The relationship between truth and reason:"Truth cannot be reached by reason alone!
Maurice Blondel