Quotes by French Authors - Page 32

Doctors of ancient times used to recommend reading to their patients as a physical exercise on an equal level as walking, running, or ball-playing.
Jean Leclercq
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
Roland Barthes
I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.
Milan Kundera
Obstinacy and heat in sticking to one's opinions is the surest proof of stupidity. Is there anything so cocksure so immovable so disdainful so contemplative so solemn and serious as an ass?
Michel de Montaigne
The bond between being and non-being can be only internal. It is within being qua being that non-being must arise, and within non-being that being must spring up; and this relation can not be a fact, a natural law, but an upsurge of the being which is its own nothingness of being.
Jean-Paul Sartre
There has been so much action in the past,” said D.H. Lawrence, “especially sexual action, a wearying repetition over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corresponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex. Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself.
Michel Foucault
My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
Gustave Flaubert
The Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.
Michel Houellebecq
The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair.
Molière
To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.
Pierre Abélard
Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.
Anatole France
Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature
Julio Cortázar
I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it 
will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve slightly bent toward evening but a hitherto unseen beauty 
lovely because of the danger which works away at it overwhelms it undermines it. Oh let me be only utter
 beauty I shall go quickly or slowly but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances the 
casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand quiet and pure like a
 glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.
Jean Genet
Those who had fought for what they called the revolution maintained a great pride: the pride of being on the correct side of the front lines. Ten or twelve years later (around the time of our story) the front lines began to melt away, and with them the correct side. No wonder the former supporters of the revolution feel cheated and are quick to seek substitute fronts; thanks to religion they can (in their role as atheists struggling against believers) stand again on the correct side and retain their habitual and precious sense of their own superiority.But to tell the truth, the substitute front was also useful to others, and it will perhaps not be too premature to disclose that Alice was one of them. Just as the directress wanted to be on the correct side, Alice wanted to be on the opposite side. During the revolution they had nationalized her papa's shop, and Alice hated those who had done this to him. But how should she show her hatred? Perhaps by taking a knife and avenging her father? But this sort of thing is not the custom in Bohemia. Alice had a better means for expressing her opposition: she began to believe in God.
Milan Kundera
A minimum put to good use is enough for anything.
Jules Verne
As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.
Roland Barthes
...pretention is very close to stupidity and that simplicity has a less visible but still gratifying aspect.
Marcel Proust
Our minds are lazier than our bodies.
La Rochefoucauld
Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion.
Jean Cocteau
In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.
Alexis de Tocqueville
One understands then why woman has no sexual parts, properly speaking. It is because she is herself a sexual part - a sexual part of man, to cumbersome for him to carry around permanently and therefore deposited outside himself for most of the time and taken up when needed. Moreover the quality that distinguishes man from animals is this very power of equipping himself at any moment with an instrument, tool or arm that he needs, but that he can get rid of straight away, whereas the lobster has to drag his two pincers about with him everywhere. And just as mans hand is a sort of grappling hook that enables him to grasp a hammer, sword or fountain pen according to his needs, so his sex is the sort of grappling hook of the sexual parts rather than the sexual part itslef.
Michel Tournier
So that's the telephone? They ring, and you run.
Edgar Degas
Art-making is not about telling the truth but making the truth felt
Christian Boltanski
I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.
Igor Stravinsky
For action, whatever its immediate purpose, also implies relief at doing something, anything, and the joy of exertion. This is the optimism that is inherent in, and proper and indispensable to action, for without it nothing would ever be undertaken. It in no way suppresses the critical sense or clouds the judgment. On the contrary this optimism sharpens the wits, it creates a certain perspective and, at the last moment, lets in a ray of perpendicular light which illuminates all one's previous calculations, cuts and shuffles them and deals you the card of success, the winning number.
Blaise Cendrars
In Burgundy and in the cities of the South the tree of Liberty was planted. That is to say, a pole topped by the revolutionary red bonnet.
Victor Hugo
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Émile Zola
Therein lies the new hope—Justice, after eighteen hundred years of impotent Charity. Ah! in a thousand years from now, when Catholicism will be naught but a very ancient superstition of the past, how amazed men will be to think that their ancestors were able to endure that religion of torture and nihility!
Émile Zola
But as soon as a man, through lack of character, takes refuge in doctrine, as soon as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism. Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.
Albert Camus
on doit des égards aux vivants, on ne doit aux morts que la vérité.
Voltaire
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
Emil M. Cioran
The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.
Marguerite Yourcenar
There is no danger if our prayer is without words or reflection because the good success of prayer depends neither on words nor on study. It depends upon the simple raising of our minds to God, and the more simple and stripped of feeling it is, the surer it is.
St. Jane Francis de Chantal
...In the end, there's no sort of difference between dying from ignorance and dying under the feet of thousands of men who have regained their freedom. You close your eyes, and then there's nothing anymore. And death is never difficult. It requires neither a hero nor a slave. It eats what it's served.
Philippe Claudel
God, who might have directed the assassin's dagger so as to end your career in a moment, has given you this quarter of an hour for repentance. Reflect, then, wretched man, and repent.
Alexandre Dumas
I like men to behave like men. I like them strong and childish.
Françoise Sagan
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
Anaïs Nin
I have no fear of ghosts, and I have never heard it said that so much harm had been done by the dead during 6,000 years as it brought by the living in a single day.
Alexandre Dumas
The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it.
Michel Houellebecq
When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.
Marcel Proust
...it's better to wake up amid the pangs of desire than amid those of remorse.
Amin Maalouf
Between two brains, there will always be misunderstandings and lies caused by parasitic smells, drafts and poor-quality reception.
Bernard Werber
What we call love is the desire to awaken and to keep awake in another's body heart and mind the responsibility of flattering in our place the self of which we are not very certain.
Paul Geraldy
I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance.
André Gide
Do not be surprised,' she said. 'It is I, and it is not I; You shall find me again, and you shall lose me; Once more shall I come among you; for few men have seen me, and none has understood me; And you shall forget me, and you shall recognize me, and you shall forget me.
Marcel Schwob
Do you believe in God, doctor?"No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original.
Albert Camus
The lot of the brideto be wed before beddesired until rotten.The lot of the authorto be read before bedadmired then forgotten.
Roman Payne
A hateful act is the transference to others of the degradation we bear in ourselves.
Simone Weil
We should tend our freedom wisely.
Michel de Montaigne
The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.
Simone de Beauvoir
It is not wise to be wiser than is necessary.
Philippe Quinault
To fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly.
Hélène Cixous
Examine your heart often to see if it is such toward your neighbor as you would like his to be toward you were you in his place. This is the touchstone of true reason.
Francis de Sales
We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.
André Breton
Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.
Gustave Flaubert
Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.
Guy Debord
Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
Montesquieu
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
Roland Barthes
All contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event.
Jean Baudrillard