Quotes by French Authors - Page 26

To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.
Muriel Barbery
Our image is here and will for ever stay,and there is comfort in knowing that the memory of our lives will always be there,traveling among the stars.
Christophe Galfard
To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry.If a man who speaks pidgin to a man of color or an Arab does not see anything wrong or evil in such behavior, it is because he has never stopped to think.
Frantz Fanon
People like us were born to change the world. It’s filled with shit. It’s filled with people who did the things they did to you. It’s filled with stupid pointlessness and ignorance and so much mundanity, it makes me want to scream. Don’t you feel it too?
Laure Eve
What good the eyes without anything behind them ? (A quoi bon les yeux - Sans rien derrière eux ?)
Charles de Leusse
what does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, 'an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,' the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the 'discovery' of relics and legends: 'fleeting visions of the French countryside,' 'fragments of music and poetry,' in short, something like an 'uprooting in one's origins (Heidegger)? What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one's own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, or being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces.
Michel de Certeau
He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.
Victor Hugo
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent
Victor Hugo
What we call fundamental truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.
Albert Camus
Life is as sad as a glass of grenadine.' ... It’s almost that. It is sad. But, at the same time, how a glass of grenadine sparkles!
Mylène Farmer
The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.
George Steiner
Confidence is not a wilted plant that can be brought back to life with a bit of water. It is a highly flammable object. Doubt sets it aflame and destroys it irreparably.
Michèle Halberstadt
Man is fully responsible for his nature, choices and lifestyle.
Jean-Paul Sartre
We need but little learning to live happily.
Michel de Montaigne
Over the following days and weeks I would come to see, with mounting weariness, that this was to be the pattern of my life from now on: marginal and grim; my habitual daydreams and memories of our life as a couple reduced to nothing, to stuttering salvoes, by the gunpowder of the simple physical truth of my husband's absence.
Marie Darrieussecq
God! when you think of all the things you could do and yet somehow never do! All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn't come fast enough. Instead of being open, you're closed up tight. Thats's the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.
Simone de Beauvoir
To limit the press is to insult a nation to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.
Claude Adrien Helvétius
The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought.
Marcel Proust
The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire.He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought
Arthur Rimbaud
Man, I can assure you, is a nasty creature.
Molière
When a pebble is thrown into a lake, everything, down to the furthermost depths, moves with it. ... And if, afterwards, everything seems as it was, the level of the lake has none the less been raised by imperceptible, incalculable degree. The old order has been overthrown -- by a pebble.
Théophile Thoré
The beauty of stature is the only beauty of men.
Michel de Montaigne
You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.
Gilles Deleuze
He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!
Charles Baudelaire
We say sound things when we do not strive to say to say extraordinary ones.
Comte de Lautréamont
What moralists describe as the mysteries of the human heart are solely the deceiving thoughts, the spontaneous impulses of self-regard. The sudden changes in character, about which so much has been said, are instinctive calculations for the furtherance of our own pleasures. Seeing himself now in his fine clothes, his new gloves and shoes, Eugène de Rastignac forgot his noble resolve. Youth, when it swerves toward wrong, dares not look in the mirror of conscience; maturity has already seen itself there. That is the whole difference between the two phases of life.
Honoré de Balzac
It is said that nothing in our lives is ever lost, that nothing can prevent its having been. That is why, so very often the weight of the past lies ineluctably upon the present. But that is why it is so real in memory, so wholly itself, so far beyond replacement.
Marcel Proust
Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people.
Victor Hugo
Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Marthe Troly-Curtin
... We are in a system that doesn't give a rap about sacredness.
Jean-François Lyotard
I fancied my luck to be witnessing yet another full moon. True, I’d seen hundreds of full moons in my life, but they were not limitless. When one starts thinking of the full moon as a common sight that will come again to one’s eyes ad-infinitum, the value of life is diminished and life goes by uncherished. ‘This may be my last moon,’ I sighed, feeling a sudden sweep of sorrow; and went back to reading more of The Odyssey.
Roman Payne
She must disappear for a time from the human surface,And sacrifice everything for this, To recreate herself from the depths of her world.
David Foenkinos
Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither he nor she; the other has only a name of his own, or her own name. The third-person pronoun is a wicked pronoun: it is the pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls. When I realize that common discourse takes possession of my other and restores that other to me in the bloodless form of a universal substitute, applied to all the things which are not here, it is as if I saw my other dead, reduced, shelved in an urn upon the wall of the great mausoleum of language. For me, the other cannot be a referent: you are never anything but you, I do not want the Other to speak of you.
Roland Barthes
It wasn't night, it was simply darkness, with me in the middle hoping all the while that time was carrying on flowing, that something would crop up, me all alone in the middle, with my veins and my muscles dissolving rapidly into nothingness, me made of molecules of flesh and thought, dispersing in a cloud (a process of expansion as sudden as that of the room, a nebula of bedroom and me, between limits that grew dimmer by the moment).
Marie Darrieussecq
Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.
Anaïs Nin
Have pity on them all, for it is we who are the real monsters.
Bernard Heuvelmans
In our life there is a single color as on an artist's palette which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.
Marc Chagall
God instituted prayer to communicate to creatures the dignity of causality.
Blaise Pascal
Once men are caught up in an event they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men.
Antoine de St. Exupery
[It's] long been known that making fun of oneself is only a way of taking oneself seriously slightly less crude than others. 97
Marcel Benabou
Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
Albert Camus
[About Pierre de Fermat] It cannot be denied that he has had many exceptional ideas, and that he is a highly intelligent man. For my part, however, I have always been taught to take a broad overview of things, in order to be able to deduce from them general rules, which might be applicable elsewhere.
René Descartes
There are only three ways to teach a child. The first is by example, the second is by example, the third is by example.
Albert Schweitzer
Learning to learn is to know how to navigate in a forest of facts ideas and theories a proliferation of constantly changing items of knowledge. Learning to learn is to know what to ignore but at the same time not rejecting innovation and research.
Raymond Queneau
So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Simone Signoret
There are very few human beings who receive the truth complete and staggering by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment on a small scale by successive developments cellularly like a laborious mosaic.
Anaïs Nin
The truth is that you are afraid.''Afraid? I do not know all the words in the Parisian jargon, and I know not what you mean.
Alexandre Dumas
Crime like virtue has its degrees.
Racine
I fear it is my lot, to bide my days in hunchbacked thought, to find what I forgot.
Roman Payne
If each of us were to confess his most secret desire the one that inspires all his plans all his actions he would say: "I want to be praised."
E. M. Cioran
He who has learned to look to God in everything he does is at the same time diverted from all vain thoughts.
John Calvin
By being natural and sincere, one often can create revolutions without having sought them.
Christian Dior
If you are to be, you must begin by assuming responsibility.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
My greatest discovery has been my love of boredom and to get fun out of it.
Julien Torma
I believe that we are henceforth incapable of returning to an order of moral life which would take the form of a simple submission to commandments or to an alien or supreme will, even if this will were represented as divine. We must accept as a positive good the critique of ethics and religion that has been undertaken by the school of suspicion. From it we have learned to understand that the commandment that gives death, not life, is a product and projection of our own weakness.
Paul Ricœur
I knelt and locked the door. I locked the door locking the world and time outside. I stretched my body across the mattress and Saskia drew in close to me and placed her open hand on my chest, her mouth near my shoulder; her breath, my breath blew out the candle, and I held my lost Wanderess with tenderness until sweet sleep overcame us.
Roman Payne
Psychologists call these fully absorbing experiences flowstates, which were discovered and named by a world-famous psychologistwith the most unpronounceable surname I have ever encountered –Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Ilona Boniwell
My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.
Marie Antoinette
Living above the world, each discovering his own weight, seeing his face brighten and darken with the day, the night, each of the four inhabitants of the house was aware of a presence that was at once a judge and a justification among them. The world, here, became a personage, counted among those from whom advice is gladly taken, those in whom equilibrium has not killed love.
Albert Camus