Quotes by French Authors - Page 3

For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to "give a meaning" to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of the mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.
Julio Cortázar
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus
Since we cannot know all there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
Blaise Pascal
The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much greater business of plunder.
Frantz Fanon
The reason why lovers are never wary of one another is this - they are always talking of themselves.
La Rochefoucauld
As a teenager, I didn’t want to be me; I wanted to be many different people. Maybe I realized that they all lived inside me and that if I managed to connect with them, they would become aspects of me.
Marion Cotillard
How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure.
Alexandre Dumas
So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, once my bad temper is exhausted, I have no language left at all: the world is not "unreal" (I could then utter it: there are arts of the unreal, among them the greatest arts of all), but disreal: reality has fled from it, is nowhere, so that I no longer have any meaning (any paradigm) available to me; *I do not manage* to define my relations with Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, the Piazza del Popolo. What relation can I have with a system of power if I am neither its slave nor its accomplice nor its witness." —from_A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_
Roland Barthes
What I see here is nothing but a shell. What is most important is invisible...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Hatred becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation.
Victor Hugo
Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I wanted to give a woman comfortable clothes that would flow with her body. A woman is closest to being naked when she is well-dressed.
Coco Chanel
My pessimism goes to the point of suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.
Jean Rostand
The paper is patient, but the reader is not.
Joseph Joubert
D'Artagnan had time to reflect that women - those gentle doves - treat one another more cruelly than bears and tigers.
Alexandre Dumas
It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.
Voltaire
So, preferring death to capture, I accomplished the most astonishing deeds, and which, more then once, showed me that the too great care we take of our bodies is the only obstacle to the sucess of those projects which require rapid decision, and vigorous and determined execution. In reality, when you have once devoted your life to your enterprises, you are no longer the equal of other men, or, rather, other men are no longer your equals, and whosoever has taken this resolution, feels his strength and resources doubled.
Alexandre Dumas
For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief.
Marcel Proust
He who knows how to suffer everything can dare everything.
Vauvenargues
I may be a little like the grown-ups. I must have grown old.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn’t fill him with the same enthusiasm
Gustave Flaubert
We are all of us richer than we think we are.
Michel de Montaigne
Peace is the only battle worth waging.
Albert Camus
I don’t want there to be things you “love about me”, I want you to love “all of me”.
Mathias Malzieu
You know-- one loves the sunset, when one is so sad...""Were you so sad, then?" I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?"But the little prince made no reply.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society.
Man Ray
Then I probably fainted. The woman at the registration desk managed to put on a sympathetic expression afterward, as if she wanted to ask, "What are you going to do now?" I told her not to worry, I was really leaving, I was going home.But go home where? Without my children I no longer had a home.
Barbara Honigmann
Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.
Georges Bataille
Those who haven't been exposed to the hypocrisies of a civilized education react to things 'naturally', as they happen. It is in the here and now that they are either happy or unhappy, joyful or sad, interested or indifferent.
Henri Charrière
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
Anaïs Nin
Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority ofmen. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn.
Valentine de Saint-Point
The propagandist naturally cannot reveal the true intentions of the principal for whom he acts... That would be to submit the projects to public discussion, to the scrutiny of public opinion, and thus to prevent their success... Propaganda must serve instead as a veil for such projects, masking true intentions.
Jacques Ellul
People have seen that I intend to sweep away everything we have been taught to consider - without question - as grace and beauty; but have overlooked my work to substitute a vaster beauty, touching all objects and beings, not excluding the most despised - and because of that, all the more exhilarating.... I would like people to look at my work as an enterprise for the rehabilitation of scorned values, and, in any case, make no mistake, a work of ardent celebration.... I am convinced that any table can be for each of us a landscape as inexhaustible as the whole Andes range... I am struck by the high value, for a man, of a simple permanent fact, like the miserable vista on which the window of his room opens daily, that comes, with the passing of time, to have an important role in his life. I often think that the highest destination at which a work of art can aim is to take on that function in someone's life.
Jean Dubuffet
Enjolras caught glimpses of a luminous uprising under the dark skirts of the future.
Victor Hugo
Brunettes are full of electricity.
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a colleague of his. "You mean you were really jealous?" she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as though someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Peace prize. Then she put her arm around his waist and began dancing across the room. The step she used was not the one she had shown off in the bar. It was more like a village polka, a wild romp that sent her legs flying in the air and her torso bounding all over the room, with Tomas in tow. Before long, unfortunately, she bagan to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealously not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death.
Milan Kundera
Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,--she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth.
Honoré de Balzac
After he had fully determined that the young man was at the bottom of this state of affairs, and that it all came from him, he Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had laboured so much upon his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve all life, all misery, and all misfortune into love; he looked within himself, and there he saw a spectre, Hatred.
Victor Hugo
A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.
Simone de Beauvoir
What you don't know by heart you haven't really loved deeply enough
George Steiner
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
Albert Camus
I passionately love liberty, legality, respect for rights, but not democracy. That is what I find in the depth of my soul.
Alexis de Tocqueville
And in any case...there are no more supernatural noises nowadays...
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity.
Alexis de Tocqueville
No passion disturbs the soundness of our judgement as anger does.
Michel de Montaigne
The torment of love can transform people into wretched monsters
Mathias Malzieu
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
Emil M. Cioran
The unnamed should not be mistaken for the nonexistent.
Jean de La Bruyère
An individual dies ... when instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being he cowers within and takes refuge there.
E. M. Cioran
His face frankly displays his suffering, expressing it with a truly royal simplicity. At such moments even the very best people are apt to give themselves away with the kind of look which says to you more or less directly: 'You see how I'm sticking it out; don't praise me, it's my nature; thanks all the same.' But the Curé de Torcy looks straight at you, guilelessly. His eyes beg your compassion and sympathy. But with what nobility they beg! A king might beg in just that way.
Georges Bernanos
When we are no longer children we are already dead
Constantin Brancusi
There is a germ of revolt lying in the spirit of inquiry and critical curiosity.
André Gide
The gratitude of most men is but a secret desire of receiving greater benefits.
La Rochefoucauld
No one will shake my conviction that those leaders of men, who are in the nature of carbuncles, of semi-conscious abscesses, who draw feverish crowds to them like noxious humours, have an innate knowledge of arrested time. They play with those vacant moments as though at a game of chequers. A fraction of suspended, frozen time, of inert time, jammed like a wedge into the most wonderfully oiled cogs of the most lucid of minds: and the whole mechanism is brought crashing to the ground, prepared to accept any authority, to endorse the most monstrous aberrations, especially collective ones.
Jacques Yonnet
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
Albert Camus
We are so small; and what must one hold on to when one no longer recognizes one's own hands, nor one's step, nor even the small dose of everyday despair.
Danielle Collobert
What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.
Albert Camus
Almost always we are bored by people to whom we ourselves are boring.
François de La Rochefoucauld
... I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other...
Marcel Proust