Quotes by French Authors - Page 30

The Ancient Mariner said to Neptune during a great storm 'O God you will save me if you wish but I am going to go on holding my tiller straight.'
Michel de Montaigne
Quarrels would not last long if the fault was only on one side.
La Rochefoucauld
Emergencies send sparks to the darkest corner of us. They wake up our hormones and neurotransmitters, they remove the rust from our body and mind, and they show us we can still handle crisis with poise. Emergencies push us to our limits. At those limits, the best inside us comes out. The eyes of our mind open, exceptional vision occurs to us, and we have a chance to become extraordinary.
Indrajit Garai
Moreover, man carries in his heart the desire always to wield his scientific knowledge in service of the greater good. He would of course never use it for destructive purposes. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! ...
Jacques Tardi
Truly it is a blessed thing to love on earth as we hope to love in Heaven, and to begin that friendship here which is to endure for ever there.
Francis de Sales
Suffering — how divine it is, how misunderstood! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.
Anatole France
Affliction compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.
Simone Weil
Instinct teaches us to look for happiness outside ourselves.
Blaise Pascal
A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He does not say "My men were beaten " he says "I was beaten."
Antoine De Saint Exupery
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
Victor Hugo
England has forty-two religions and only two sauces.
Voltaire
Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images, the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire: that is MUHAMMAD. As regards all the standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask IS THERE ANY MAN GREATER THAN HE?
Alphonse de Lamartine
And the fox said to the little prince: men have forgotten this truth, but you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
This stretch through the fogbound forest gradually lulled Grange into his favorite daydream; in it he saw an image of his life: all that he had he carried with him; twenty feet away, the world grew dark, perspectives blurred, and there was nothing near him but this close halo of warm consciousness, this nest perched high above the vague earth.
Julien Gracq
There's also a lot of random stuff about poetry, flowers and lute music, plus kissing and cuddling (lots of this), wearing similar outfits, talking incessantly about the current object of devotion, and generally losing one's faculties.
Joanne Harris
Alexander Caesar Charlemagne and I myself have founded empires but upon what do these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon love and to this very day millions would die for Him.
Napoleon
It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
Voltaire
The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting out in order the causes of love; that would be absurd.
Blaise Pascal
For a young man has strong imagination but poor judgment, so that he imagines others to be as big as he is but considers himself to be very small. He has unbounded trust in the universe but is constantly unsure of himself.
Marcel Proust
If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter the whole face of the earth would have been changed.
Pascal
Everyone can get the gold of the Sun. (Tout le monde cueille - L'or du soleil)
Charles de Leusse
We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.
Michel de Montaigne
Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.
Marguerite Duras
We knit alone our life, before seeing by it our shroud. (Nous tricotons notre vie seule, Avant d'y voir notre linceul)
Charles de Leusse
Though men pride themselves on their great actions often they are not the result of any great design but of chance.
François de La Rochefoucauld
When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium.
Émile Zola
He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.
Simone Weil
A girl without braids is like a city without bridges.
Roman Payne
You make me thirsty, Promethea, my river, you make me eternally thirsty, my water. As if I had spent my life in an old house of dried mud, so dry myself that I could not even thirst, until yesterday. And suddenly yesterday, the dusty floor of my old house burst open and while I was still dozing away my parched existence, drop by drop I heard the music of coolness awaken the thirst under my dry soul. And leaning over the dark shaft of my life, I saw my childhood springs unearthed. Is that always how (by accident) we rediscover Magdalenian riches?
Hélène Cixous
In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I respect only those who resist me but cannot tolerate them.
Charles de Gaulle
I woke up, smiling to myself at this dream with its allegorical aspects but with no real meaning.
Jean de Berg
Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.
Frédéric Chopin
Why was love such an addictive drug?Why did loving someone cause such suffering?
Guillaume Musso
My best moment? I have a lot of good moments but the one I prefer is when I kicked the hooligan
Eric Cantona
The imagination is always more horrible than the truth.
Hervé Guibert
If one had but a single glance to give the world one should gaze on Istanbul.
Alphonse de Lamartine
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
Jean Cocteau
The Empire was on the point of turning Paris into the bawdy house of Europe. The gang of fortune-seekers who had succeeded in stealing a throne required a reign of adventures, shady transactions, sold consciences, bought women, and rampant drunkenness.
Émile Zola
I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essentially human, not intellectual. I do not understand abstract act. Only art born of love, passion, pain.
Anaïs Nin
But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme power that is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or does it volatilize itself in the simulacra that, alone, deploy their power and pomp of fascination - the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God?
Jean Baudrillard
A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs.
Gustave Le Bon
What is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies. The fact of being quick or slow isn’t really relevant.
Laurent Schwartz
Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.
Emil M. Cioran
If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.
Muriel Barbery
When we want to awaken a thought in anyone, what are the means at our disposal? One only, to produce in him by word and sign states of sensibility and of imagination, emotion and memory in which he will discover our idea and make it his own.
Antonin Sertillanges
The country has charms only for those not obliged to stay there.
Edouard Manet
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
Marie Curie
It's a hypothesis. History won't take us far enough to confirm it. And our certainties never really hold water. One day you feel like dying and the next you realize all you had to do was go down a few stairs to find the light switch so you could see things a bit more clearly.
Anna Gavalda
Alone within the vast tribunal that is the stormy sky, the pilot is in contention for his mailbags with three elemental divinities: mountain, sea and storm.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Let us accept truth even when it surprises us and alters our views.
George Sand
The medals of the dead heroes are the coins for the future. (Les médailles des héros morts - Sont les pièces pour l'avenir.)
Charles de Leusse
ZENITHNOON beats outon its solar anvilthe rays of light
Sonia Delaunay
It goes without saying that these effects do not suffice to annul the necessity for a “change of terrain.” It also goes without saying that the choice between these two forms of deconstruction cannot be simple and unique. A new writing must weave and interlace these two motifs of deconstruction. Which amounts to saying that one must speak several languages and produce several texts at once. I would like to point out especially that the style of the first deconstruction is mostly that of the Heideggerian questions, and the other is mostly the one which dominates France today. I am purposely speaking in terms of a dominant style: because there are also breaks and changes of terrain in texts of the Heideggerian type; because the “change of terrain” is far from upsetting the entire French landscape to which I am referring; because what we need, perhaps, as Nietzsche said, is a change of “style”; and if there is style, Nietzsche reminded us, it must be plural.
Jacques Derrida
When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?
Muriel Barbery
He lives happy and master of himself who can say as each day passes on, "I have lived.
Michel de Montaigne
Cosette, do you hear? he has come to that! he asks my forgiveness! And do you know what he has done for me, Cosette? He has saved my life. He has done more--he has given you to me. And after having saved me, and after having given you to me, Cosette, what has he done with himself? He has sacrificed himself. Behold the man. And he says to me the ingrate, to me the forgetful, to me the pitiless, to me the guilty one: Thanks! Cosette, my whole life passed at the feet of this man would be too little. That barricade, that sewer, that furnace, that cesspool,--all that he traversed for me, for thee, Cosette! He carried me away through all the deaths which he put aside before me, and accepted for himself. Every courage, every virtue, every heroism, every sanctity he possesses! Cosette, that man is an angel!
Victor Hugo
French girls still have the Jane Birkin culture. You can go just like that, without makeup, without managing your hair.
Emmanuelle Alt