Quotes by French Authors - Page 29

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
How was she created? I'm not sure if you realize this, but it was in God's image. How can anybody dare to speak ill of something which bears such a noble imprint?
Christine de Pizan
Live with no time out.
Simone de Beauvoir
Friends are relatives you make for yourself.
Eustache Deschamps
Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.
André Breton
The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.
James Goldsmith
A beautiful dress may look beautiful on a hanger, but that means nothing. It must be seen on the shoulders, with the movement of the arms, the legs, and the waist.
Coco Chanel
We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful.
Marc Augé
Hasten slowly and without losing heart put your work twenty times upon the anvil.
Nicolas Boileau
When your day has been teeming with different sensations, when you have things on your mind, you can get to sleep to start with but you can't get back to sleep. Sleep comes a lot more easily than it comes back.
Victor Hugo
I do believe in poetry. I believe that there are creatures endowed with the power to put things together and bring them back to life
Hélène Cixous
‎The greatest danger of a terrorist's bomb is in the explosion of stupidity that it provokes.
Octave Mirbeau
I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct.
Marguerite Yourcenar
As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
Milan Kundera
A woman of honor should not suspect another of things she would not do herself.
Marguerite de Valois
To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Act and God will act.
Joan of Arc
Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much
Blaise Pascal
First of all, I wish you love, and that by loving you may also be loved.But if it’s not like that, be brief in forgettingAnd after you’ve forgotten, don’t keep anything.
Victor Hugo
May a man live well-, and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him.
Roman Payne
[T]hus one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, the power relation is already present: an illusion, then, to denounce this relation for a repression exerted after the event.
Michel Foucault
Exciting happiness is joy, celebration, travelling, being in bed with a woman you desire.
François Lelord
I do as I please, Monsieur Beauchamp, and believe me, what I do is always well done.
Alexandre Dumas
The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.
Albert Camus
There will always remain more ashes than remorse.
Hubert Haddad
The art of statemanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
In marked contrast to the relaxed, typically Latin attitude of the Dominicans the Protestant missionaries were still proceeding at full blast with the fight for souls. These North American evangelists of strictly fundamentalist inclination combined in a curious fashion strict adhesion to the literal meaning of the Old Testament With mastery of the most modern technology. Most of them came from small towns in the Bible Belt, armed with unshakably clear consciences and a rudimentary smattering of theology, convinced that they alone were the repositories of Christian values now abolished elsewhere. Totally ignorant of the vast world, despite their transplantation, and taking the few articles of morality accepted in the rural Amenca of their childhoods to be a universal credo, they strove bravely to spread these principles of salvation all around them.Their rustic faith was well served by a flotilla of light aircraft, a powerful radio, an ultra-modern hospital and four-wheel-drive vehicles -- in short, all the equipment that a battalion of crusaders dropped behind enemy lines needed.
Philippe Descola
For there comes a time in life when the pity previously reserved only for children takes on a different form, a time when we study the faces of 'old people' and sense that one day we will be just like them. And that is the moment when early childhood comes to an end.
Irène Némirovsky
I reeled with giddiness - flames passed before my eyes.I remembered those precipices that drew one towards them with irresistible power - wells that have had to be filled up because of persons throwing themselves into them - trees that have had to be cut down because of people hanging themselves upon them - the contagion of suicide and theft and murder, which at various times has taken possession of people's minds, by means well understood; that strange inducement, which makes people kill themselves because others kill themselves. My hair rose upon my head with horror!("The Invisible Eye")
Erckmann-Chatrian
Old age is that night of life as night is the old age of day. Still night is full of magnificence and for many it is more brilliant than the day.
Anne-Sophie Swetchine
The only thing to know is how to use your neuroses.
Arthur Adamov
There are certain people who so ardently and passionately desire a thing that from dread of losing it they leave nothing undone to make them lose it.
Jean de La Bruyère
When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.
Sacha Guitry
I am going to die, but that is of no importance.
Muriel Barbery
Sin as little as possible-that is the law of mankind. Not to sin at all is the dream of the angel. All earthly things are subject to sin. Sin is like gravity.
Victor Hugo
Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. But I am more preoccupied with loving.
Anaïs Nin
A fondness for roving, for making a name for themselves in their onw country, and for boasting of what they had seen in their travels, was so strong in our two wanderers, that they resolved to be no longer happy; and demanded permission of the king to leave the country.
Voltaire
He had fallen in love with her emotions, and that was a very profound feeling indeed.
François Lelord
The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of "perversions." Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.
Michel Foucault
You'll stop hurting when you stop hoping.
Guillaume Musso
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
Albert Camus
The art of opposition and of revolution is to unsettle established customs, sounding them even to their source, to point out their want of authority and justice.
Blaise Pascal
Quoting Father Seraphim:Our life hangs only by a breath. It is the thread that links you to the Father, the Source, which brought you into being. Be conscious of this thread, and go where you will. (27)
Jean-Yves Leloup
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
Victor Hugo
The spectacle has changed but our eyes remain the same.
Joseph Joubert
To attempt, to brave, to persist, and persevere, to be faithful to one's self, to wrestle with destiny, to astound the catastrophe by the slight fear which is causes us, now to confront unjust power, again to insult intoxicated victory, to hold firm and withstand -- such is the example which nations need and the light which electrifies them.
Victor Hugo
More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
The only things you learn are the things you tame
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love.
Guy Sajer
Jaques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, everything I did not possess. It was to him I owed pains and pleasures whose violence alone saved me from the deserts of boredom in which I found myself bogged down.
Simone de Beauvoir
By the work one knows the workman.
Jean de La Fontaine
Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.
La Rochefoucauld
Of course I love you. It is my fault that you have not known it all the while" (the flower to little prince)
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Even from the point of view of coquetry, pure and simple," he had told her, "can't you see how much of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying?
Marcel Proust
But I was brought up on convent morals and paternal nationalism, I was getting bogged down in contradictions.
Simone de Beauvoir
The capacity of passion is both cruel and divine
George Sand
Why does a steward steal? He steals because he's not sure he'll always remain with his master and wants to make his future secure.
Alexandre Dumas
Motherhood is still the great unknown. For some, it brings incomparable happiness and enriches their identity. Others manage as best they can to reconcile contradictory demands.
Élisabeth Badinter
Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Defeat is a thing of weariness of incoherence of boredom.
Antoine De Saint Exupery