Quotes by French Authors - Page 28

Moreover, the sciences are monuments devoted to the public good; each citizen owes to them a tribute proportional to his talents. While the great men, carried to the summit of the edifice, draw and put up the higher floors, the ordinary artists scattered in the lower floors, or hidden in the obscurity of the foundations, must only seek to improve what cleverer hands have created.
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
Affected simplicity is refined imposture.
La Rochefoucauld
You can tell who your friends are because they don’t prevent you from being on your own, because they illuminate your solitude without interrupting it.
Christian Bobin
Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
Anaïs Nin
There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
Marquis de Sade
Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.
Gustave Flaubert
A war regarded as inevitable or even probable and therefore much prepared for has a very good chance of eventually being fought.
Anaïs Nin
The dark clouds make the black sea. (Les nuages noirs - Font la mer noire)
Charles de Leusse
Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.
Voltaire
Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.
André Breton
Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire
It is now and in this world that we must live.
André Gide
Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.
Marcel Marceau
so if you love him, why keep him waiting for 13 years?""Because I was afraid. Afraid of not being worthy, afraid of not knowing how to love him, afraid of waking up one day and not loving him anymore.
Guillaume Musso
Art is science made clear.
Jean Cocteau
Nevertheless man has found love, which is not a bad reply to that sly Deity, and he has adorned it with so much poetry that woman often forgets the sensual part of it. Those among us who are unable to deceive themselves have invented vice and refined debauchery, which is another way of laughing at God and paying homage, immodest homage, to beauty.
Guy de Maupassant
We must unceasingly ask for [perseverance] by making use of the means which God has taught us for obtaining it: prayer, fasting, almsgiving, frequenting the sacraments, association with good companions, and hearing and reading Holy Scripture.
Francis de Sales
All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction.
Voltaire
It's hard luck always having to be a judge.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.
Jean Anouilh
Thinking must never submit itself, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, if not to facts themselves, because, for it, to submit would be to cease to be.
Jules Henri Poincaré
That is the hardest thing of all. It is much harder to judge yourself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself, it's because you're truly a wise man.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
My life didn't please me, so I created my life.
Coco Chanel
Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment
Michel de Montaigne
A man's palate can in time become accustomed to anything.
Napoleon
When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.
Colette
Everything has its poetry. 94
Joseph Joubert
Courage is a virtue only so far as it is directed by prudence.
Francois de Fenelon
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
Gustave Flaubert
One should embrace the artist's profession only after recognising in oneself an intense passion for Nature and the disposition to pursue it with a perseverance that nothing can shatter - thirst for neither approval nor financial profit. Do not be discouraged by the censure that might fall upon one's works - one must be armoured with a strong conviction which makes one go straight ahead fearing no obstacle. An unremitting task […] an unassailable conscience. (From a sketchbook of 1847).
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that's exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours digging a tunnel to enter the strongroom of a bank. He emerges face to face with hundreds of strongboxes, all identical, and opens them one by one. And each time a box is opened, it loses its anonymity and becomes unique: one is filled with paintings, another with a bundle of banknotes, a third with jewels or letters tied in ribbon, engravings, objects of no value at all, silverware, photos, gold sovereigns, dried flowers, files of paper, crystal glasses, or children’s toys--and so on. There is something intoxicating about opening a new one, finding its contents and feeling overjoyed that in a trice one is no longer in front of a set of boxes, but in the presence of the riches and wretched banalities that make up human existence.
Jacques Bonnet
To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.
Claude Adrien Helvétius
Much more likely you’ll hurt me. Still what does it matter? If I’ve got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands.
Jean-Paul Sartre
We must dare and dare again and go on daring.
Georges Jacques Danton
The fate of animals is of far greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous.
Émile Zola
Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Physicians of the Utmost Fame were called at once but when they came they answered as they took their fees 'There is no cure for this disease.'
Hilaire Belloc
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
Love of justice is for most men only the courage to suffer injustice.
Comte de Lautréamont
Is it faith to understand nothing, and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church?
John Calvin
Then his jealousy rejoiced at the discovery, as though that jealousy had had an independent existence, fiercely egotistical, gluttonous of every thing that would feed its vitality, even at the expense of Swann himself.
Marcel Proust
The East is unfamiliar with those confessions, memoirs, and autobiographies so beloved in the West. There is a clear difference in tonality. One's gaze never lingers on the suffering humanity of Christ, but penetrates behind the kenotic veil. To the West's mysticism of the Cross and its veneration of the Sacred Heart corresponds the eastern mysticism of the sealed tomb, from which eternal life eternal wells up.
Paul Evdokimov
When the image is new, the world is new.
Gaston Bachelard
Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.
François de La Rochefoucauld
We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.
Simone Weil
-I love you, Lenny.-From the diaphragm.-What are you talking about?-You have to say it from the diaphragm. That's a muscle in here. Real deep, not from the throat. I tried to be an actor once and that's the first thing they told me. That's when I quit. I just didn't have that much in my diaphragm.
Romain Gary
A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.
Jean Anouilh
We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.
George Steiner
How was she to reconcile men's desire with the desire to be beautiful in their eyes? At first she had tried for a compromise (desperate journeys abroad, where nobody knew her and no indiscretion could betray her); then, later on, she had gone radical and sacrificed her erotic life to her beauty.
Milan Kundera
Do not be discouraged by the resistance you will encounter from your human nature; you must go against your human inclinations. Often, in the beginning, you will think that you are wasting time, but you must go on, be determined and persevere in it until death, despite all the difficulties.
Brother Lawrence
...intimacy isn't something men talk about. They may talk about politics, literature, stocks, or sports, depending on the man, but about their love lives they keep silent, even to their dying breath.
Michel Houellebecq
The pleasure of criticizing takes away from us the pleasure of being moved by some very fine things.
Jean de La Bruyère
There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.
Voltaire
I love these words that just can't be translated from language to language. They seem dignified, grounded, battling against the imperialism of reality.
Olivier Magny
But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do.
Albert Camus
Weakness or strength: there you are, strength. You do not know where you are going, nor why you are going; enter anywhere, reply to anything. They will no more kill you than if you were a corpse.” In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.In cities, suddenly, the mud seemed red and black like a mirror when the lamp moves about in the adjoining room, like a treasure in the forest! Good luck, I cried, and I saw a sea of flames and smoke in the sky; to the right, to the left all the riches of the world flaming like a billion thunder-bolts.
Arthur Rimbaud
Be happy. It's one way of being wise
Colette
Some troubles like a protested note of a solvent debtor bear interest.
Honoré de Balzac
Power changes its appearance but not its reality.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
His brain was in one of those states that are both violent and yet frighteningly calm, in which thought runs so deep it blots out reality. You no longer see the objects around you, yet you can see the shapes in your mind as thought they are outside your body.
Victor Hugo