Quotes by French Authors - Page 33

I never sleep comfortably except when I am at sermon or when I pray to God.
François Rabelais
Put your Body First!
Catherine Piot
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
Honoré de Balzac
Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
Simone Weil
This is what’s happening: together we are descending the stairs of the heart, which lead to the sources. (It is a secret staircase. I knew it existed. Which is why I avoided it. Because it leads to the other-life, deep, underground, the fluvial, the painful.)We are in the process of descending into the depths of the heart. To where bodies communicate with each other.
Hélène Cixous
Progress - the stride of God!
Victor Hugo
There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.
Albert Camus
Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.", 1964)
Colette
It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter, The state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never
Cardinal Richelieu
Scepticism is the first step towards truth.
Denis Diderot
Do you think that a doe in the jaws of a tiger feels less horror than you? People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability for suffering as humans, because otherwise they couldn't bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror and nothing but horror." Paul was pleased that man was gradually covering the whole earth with concrete. It was as if he were watching a cruel murderess being walled up.
Milan Kundera
Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink.
Guy Debord
He who complains sins.
Saint Francis de Sales
What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.
André Gide
Questions show the mind's range, and answers its subtlety.
Joseph Joubert
Life is the sum of all your choices.
Albert Camus
Soldiers forty centuries are looking down upon you from these pyramids.
Napoleon
Those who are ignorant should be taught all you can teach them; society is to blame for not providing free public education; and society will answer for the obscurity it produces. If the soul is left in darkness, sin will be committed. The guilty party is not he who has sinned but he who created the darkness in the first place.
Victor Hugo
...on opening the incubator I experienced one of those rare moments of intense emotion which reward the research worker for all his pains: at first glance I saw that the broth culture, which the night before had been very turbid was perfectly clear: all the bacteria had vanished... as for my agar spread it was devoid of all growth and what caused my emotion was that in a flash I understood: what causes my spots was in fact an invisible microbe, a filterable virus, but a virus parasitic on bacteria. Another thought came to me also, If this is true, the same thing will have probably occurred in the sick man. In his intestine, as in my test-tube, the dysentery bacilli will have dissolved away under the action of their parasite. He should now be cured.
Félix d'Herelle
I would have praised you more had you praised me less.
Louis XIV
I have always thought that in revolutions, especially democratic revolutions, madmen, not those so called by courtesy, but genuine madmen, have played a very considerable political part. One thing is certain, and that is that a condition of semi-madness is not unbecoming at such times, and often even leads to success.
Alexis de Tocqueville
To breath the air of Paris preserves the soul.
Victor Hugo
Yes, this man had the persistence of an insect.
Patrick Modiano
The critics greeted this book with a churlish and horrified outcry. Certain virtuous people, in newspapers no less virtuous, made a grimace of disgust as they picked it up with the tongs to throw it into the fire. Even the minor literary reviews, the ones that retail nightly the tittle-tattle from alcoves and private rooms, held their noses and talked of filth and stench. I am not complaining about this reception; on the contrary I am delighted to observe that my colleagues have such maidenly susceptibilities.
Émile Zola