Quotes by French Authors - Page 31

O heavenly Father,protect and bless all thingsthat have breath: guard themfrom all evil and let them sleep in peace.
Albert Schweitzer
Crime brings together honest men and concentrates them.
Émile Durkheim
She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.
Émile Zola
Time is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at and who steals what is most precious to men.
Napoléon Bonaparte
In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.
Simone de Beauvoir
If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning.
Jules Verne
L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu.
Charles Baudelaire
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
There are men who put the weight of a coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere shawls for their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre, or think of going to the Bouffons, or of setting up a carriage; who are murderers in thought when dear ones, with the irresistable charm of innocence, hold up childish foreheads to be kissed with a ‘Good-night, father!’ Hourly they meet the gaze of eyes they would fain close forever, eyes that still open each morning to the light. . . God alone knows the number of those who are parricides in thought
Honoré de Balzac
If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it.
Michel de Montaigne
No one is ever satisfied where he is....Only the children know what they’re looking for....
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Extreme civilization robs crime of its frightful poetry, and prevents the writer from restoring it. That would be too dreadful, say those good souls who want everything to be prettified, even the horrible. In the name of philanthropy, imbecile criminologists reduce the punishment, and inept moralists the crime, and what is more they reduce the crime only in order to reduce the punishment. Yet the crimes of extreme civilization are undoubtedly more atrocious than those of extreme barbarism, by virtue of their refinement, of the corruption they imply and of their superior degree of intellectualism. ("A Woman's Vengeance")
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
God keeps the wicked to give them time to repent.
Sophie Rostopchine Sigur
The innocent is the person who explains nothing.
Albert Camus
Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
Milan Kundera
The confidence which we have in ourselves gives birth to much of that which we have in others.
La Rochefoucauld
Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory... Everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion - it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.
Albert Camus
I like reality. It tastes of bread.
Jean Anouilh
To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.
Roland Barthes
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
Jean Cocteau
A writer is a world trapped in a person.
Victor Hugo
The poet…is the man of metaphor: while the philosopher is interested only in the truth of meaning, beyond even signs and names, and the sophist manipulates empty signs…the poet plays on the multiplicity of signifieds.
Jacques Derrida
Every failure made me more confident. Because I wanted even more to achieve things as revenge. To show that I could.
Roman Polanski
A book is like a large cemetery upon whose tombs one can no longer read the effaced names. On the other hand, sometimes one remembers well the name, without knowing if anything of the being, whose name it was, survives in these pages.
Marcel Proust
Monsieur Bienvenu was simply a man who accepted these mysterious questions...and who had in his soul a deep respect for the mystery which enveloped them.
Victor Hugo
There can be no peace of mind in love since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires.
Marcel Proust
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Frédéric Bastiat
We only do well the things we like doing.
Colette
Down the rusty bars of ladders to the undergrounds of the night propitious to the first man and woman at the beginning of the world. where there were no words by which to possess each other, no music for serenades, no presents to court with, no tournaments to impress and force a yielding, no secondary instruments, no adornments, necklaces, crowns to subdue, but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous, impaling of a woman on a man´s sensual mast
Anaïs Nin
Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.
Blaise Pascal
The faithful of Shiva or Dionysus seek contact with those forces which...lead to a refusal of the politics, ambitions and limitations of ordinary social life. This does not involve simply a recognition of world harmony, but also an active participation in an experience which surpasses and upsets the order of material life.
Alain Daniélou
I don't go after him. He's a funny sort of boy. I've known that from the start. Not just because he seems angry and contemptuous or the way he walks like a tough guy. Because of his smile - it's a child's smile.
Delphine de Vigan
The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment’s silence, "Perhaps more so.
Victor Hugo
How shallow is the stage on which this vast drama of human hates and joys and friendships is played! Whence do men draw this passion for eternity, flung by chance as they are upon a scarcely cooled bed of lava, threatened by the beginning by the deserts that are to be, under the constant menace of the snows? Their civilizations are but fragile gildings: a volcano can blot them out, a new sea, a sand-storm.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.
François de La Rochefoucauld
When everything is social, suddenly nothing is.
Jean Baudrillard
To be ambitious for wealth and yet always expecting to be poor to be always doubting your ability to get what you long for is like trying to reach east by traveling west. There is no philosophy which will help a man to succeed when he is always doubting his ability to do so and thus attracting failure. No matter how hard you work for success if your thought is saturated with the fear of failure it will kill your efforts neutralize your endeavors and make success impossible.
Charles Baudouin
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
Voltaire
Has he written to you?''He writes frequently.''Shew me his letters this instant, I order you'; and M. de Renal added six feet to his stature.
Stendhal
Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.
Marcel Proust
Criticism demands infinitely more culture than artistic creation.
Pierre Bayard
You lift your head, you’re on your way, but really just to be walking, to be out of doors. That’s it, that’s all, and you’re there. Outdoors is our element: the exact sensation of living there.
Frédéric Gros
While I am busy with little things I am not required to do greater things.
St. Francis de Sales
Science, great, mighty and in the end unerring, science has fallen into many errors - errors which have been fortunate and useful rather than otherwise, for they have been the steppingstones to truth.
Jules Verne
If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy but we want to be happier than other people which is almost always difficult since we think them happier than they are.
Charles de Montesquieu
Simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity, they [media] propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act, they are themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction.
Jean Baudrillard
Do we ever have to abandon all hope? Is it not perhaps a good thing that by refusing to give in to the evidence, the dreams that lie half awake in us all may persist?
Théodore Monod
If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.
Milan Kundera
It’s the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Not being heard is no reason for silence.
Victor Hugo
In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.
Muriel Barbery
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.
Michel Houellebecq
A fashion that does not reach the streets is not a fashion
Coco Chanel
What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
Paul Valéry
Heureuse la mort qui oste le loisir aux apprests de tel equipage.
Michel de Montaigne
As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.
Julio Cortázar
At certain moments, words are nothing; it is thetone in which they are uttered.
Paul Bourget
Rest in Peace?’ Why that phrase? That’s the most ridiculous phrase I’ve ever heard! You die, and they say ‘Rest in Peace!’ …Why would one need to ‘rest’ when they’re dead?! I spent thousands of years of world history resting. While Agamemnon was leading his ships to Troy, I was resting. While Ovid was seducing women at the chariot races, I was resting. While Jeanne d’Arc was hallucinating, I was resting. I wait until airplanes are scuttling across the sky to burst out onto the scene, and I’m only going to be here for a short while, so when I die, I certainly won’t need to rest again! Not while more adventures of the same kind are going on.
Roman Payne
I was so enthused with literature -- not stuck on literature, but in love with letters -- that I was easily inclined to bring all the conversations round to works I had read or fictitious characters from my readings about whom I loved to talk
Joseph Zobel
She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.
Albert Camus