Quotes by French Authors - Page 5

He was there alone with himself, collected, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations, and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe.
Victor Hugo
In prayer more is accomplished by listening than by talking.
Jane Frances de Chantal
That is the definition of truth, it is the thing you must not say. “The miracle into which the child and the poet walk” [Tsvetaeva] as if walking home, and home is there…The thing that is both known and unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. Kafka says—one very small line lost in his writing—“to the depths, to the depths.
Hélène Cixous
… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass … by which I could give them the means to read within themselves.
Marcel Proust
Gifted Deirdre cast the spell that enabled our souls to eventually be reunited. She couldn't bear for us to be apart, and neither could I.
Hope Irving
Education -- whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people, or even oneself -- consists in creating motives. To show what is beneficial, what is obligatory, what is good -- that is the task of education. Education concerns itself with the motives for effective action. For no action is ever carried out in the absence of motives capable of supplying the indispensable amount of energy for its execution.
Simone Weil
Valérie: "You know, you don't need to be a lesbian to be a feminist. Nor do you need short hair to be a lesbian. Or a feminist.""Yes, but helps, doesd't it?" Astrid counters
Clémentine Beauvais
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.
Victor Hugo
A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas. But too much reverie submerges and drowns. Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie it's pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment.
Victor Hugo
In every action we must look beyond the action at our past, present and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all these things.
Blaise Pascal
She said she didn't love him, and he said it didn't matter, and the poverty of their words brought tears to their eyes.
Françoise Sagan
It is important never to separate love and knowledge, compassion and wisdom. A wisdom without compassion is closed upon itself and does not bear fruit. A compassion without wisdom is a madness and a cause of suffering.
Jean-Yves Leloup
Music is given to us specifically to make order of things to move from an anarchic individualistic state to a regulated perfectly concious one which alone insures vitality and durability.
Igor Stravinsky
I just wish moments weren’t so fleeting!' Isaac called to the man on the roof, 'They pass so quickly!' 'Fleeting?!' responded the tilling man, 'Moments? They pass quickly?! . . . Why, once a man is finished growing, he still has twenty years of youth. After that, he has twenty years of middle age. Then, unless misfortune strikes, nature gives him twenty thoughtful years of old age. Why do you call that quickly?' And with that, the tilling man wiped his sweaty brow and continued tilling; and the dejected Isaac continued wandering. 'Stupid fool!' Isaac muttered quietly to himself as soon as he was far enough away not to be heard.
Roman Payne
To be able to dispense with good things is tantamount to possessing them.
Jean Francois Regnard
Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest. To be this ploughman, to see my labours result in the furtherance of scientific progress, was the height of my ambition, and now the Swedish Academy of Sciences has come, at this harvest, to add the most brilliant of crowns.
Paul Sabatier
The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.
Frédéric Bastiat
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
Albert Camus
Genius: Range of mind, power of imagination, and responsiveness of soul: this is genius. The man of genius has a soul with greater range, can therefore be struck by the feelings of all beings, is concerned with everything in nature, and never receives an idea that does not evoke a feeling. Everything stirs him and everything is retained within him.When the soul has been moved by an object itself, it is even more affected by the memory of the object. But in a man of genius imagination goes further: it recalls ideas with a more vivid feeling than it received them, because to these ideas are connected a thousand others more appropriate to arouse the feeling.
Jean-François de Saint-Lambert
As I begin to recognise that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognise that I am a Negro. There are two ways out of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no attention to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it. I try then to find value for what is bad--since I have unthinkingly conceded that the black man is the colour of evil. In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman in short, I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and through one human being, to reach out for the universal. When the Negro dives--in other words, goes under--something remarkable occurs.
Frantz Fanon
The beautiful is always bizarre.
Charles Baudelaire
In Paris, where raillery is so quick to throw emotion out the window, silence, in a roomful of clever people after a story, is the most flattering of all marks of success
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
Little faults become great, and even monstrous in our eyes, in proportion as the pure light of God increases in us; just as the sun in rising, reveals the true dimensions of objects which were dimly and confusedly discovered during the night.
François Fénelon
The heart has reasons which reason cannot understand.
Blaise Pascal
Oh! Science! Everything has been revised. For the body and for the soul,--the viaticum,—there are medicine and philosophy,—old wives' remedies and popular songs rearranged. And the pastimes of princes and games they proscribed! Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry!...Science, the new nobility! Progress. The world marches on! Why shouldn’t it turn?It is the vision of numbers. We are going toward the Spirit. There’s no doubt about it, an oracle, I tell you. I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.
Arthur Rimbaud
Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
No circumstance in the world can ever prevent us from believing in God, from placing all our trust in him, from loving him with our whole heart, or from loving our neighbor. Faith, hope, and charity are absolutely free, because if they are rooted in us deeply enough, they are able to draw strength from whatever opposes them! If someone sought to prevent us from believing by persecuting us, we always would retain the option of forgiving our enemies and transforming the situation of oppression into one of greater love. If someone tried to silence our faith by killing us, our deaths would be the best possible proclamation of our faith! Love, and only love, can overcome evil by good and draw good out of evil.
Jacques Philippe
(Evolution) general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire
You leave behind your fine poems.You leave behind your beautiful flowers. And the earth that was only leant to you. You ascend into the Light, O Quechomitl, you leave behind the flowers and the singing and the earth. Safe journey, O friend.
Aliette de Bodard
The surplus of the heart overflows from a smile. (Le surplus du coeur - Déborde d'un sourire)
Charles de Leusse
How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
Gustave Flaubert
After Chopin's death, Polish patriots cut up his body to take out his heart. They nationalized this poor muscle and buried it in Poland.A dead person is treated either as trash or as a symbol. Either way, it's the same disrespect to his vanished individuality.
Milan Kundera
There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.
Albert Camus
Hélène slowly surveyed the room. In this respectable society, amongst these apparently decent middle-class people, were there none but faithless wives? With her strict provincial morality, she was amazed at the licensed promiscuity of Parisian life.
Émile Zola
This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity, and if he writes what occurs to him he succeeds better than if he copies, with the help of a magnifying glass, objects placed outside of him.
Théophile Gautier
One must always be prepared to switch sides with justice, that fugitive of the winning camp.
Simone Weil
The mere ambition to write a poem is enough to kill it.
Henri Michaux
The self-esteem one acquires and a well-earned feeling of one's strength are the only consolation in this world. Income, after all, most brutes have that.
Paul Gauguin
Ah! I wish I had the courage to work for the debasement of my contemporaries. What good work it would be to defile their daughters: to insinuate something obscene into the infantile hands which caress each paternal beard and cheek; to poison them, even at the risk of perishing ourselves; to do as those Spanish monks did, who drank death in order that they might persuade the French rabble which had violated their monastery to do likewise.
Rémy de Gourmont
In this instant of danger they realized they were each other's reason for living, and into this instant they threw their whole being.
Anaïs Nin
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
Victor Hugo
From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent. It can only be squandered.
Roman Payne
...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.
Guy de Maupassant
Losses are comparative only imagination makes them of any moment.
Blaise Pascal
The body is poisoned through the mouth, even so is the heart through the ear ... And even if we do mean no harm, the Evil One means a great deal, and he will use those idle words as a sharp weapon against some neighbor's heart.
Francis de Sales
Where would you be without etymology'? Lea asked sarcastically.'I think I might find words a little less interesting,' said Mr Ruche.
Denis Guedj
Les enfants qui s'aiment s'embrassent deboutContre les portes de la nuitEt les passants qui passent les désignent du doigtMais les enfants qui s'aimentNe sont là pour personneEt c'est seulement leur ombreQui tremble dans la nuitExcitant la rage des passantsLeur rage, leur mépris, leurs rires et leur envieLes enfants qui s'aiment ne sont là pour personneIls sont ailleurs bien plus loin que la nuitBien plus haut que le jourDans l'éblouissante clarté de leur premier amour
Jacques Prévert
His [Morel's] nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out.
Marcel Proust
Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
Anaïs Nin
Je pensais de meme que notre jeunesse etait finie et le bonheur manqué. I thought too that our youth was over and we had failed to find happiness.
Alain-Fournier
Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.
Victor Hugo
Be happy. It's one way of being wise.
Colette
Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.
Robert Bresson
Relegated as he was to a corner and as though sheltered behind the billiard table, the soldiers, their eyes fixed upon Enjolras, had not even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat the order: 'Take aim!' when suddenly they heard a powerful voice cry out beside them, 'Vive la Republique! Count me in.'Grantaire was on his feet. The immense glare of the whole combat he had missed and in which he had not been, appeared in the flashing eyes of the transfigured drunkard.He repeated, 'Vive la Republique!' crossed the room firmly, and took his place in front of the muskets beside Enjolras.'Two at one shot,' he said.And, turning toward Enjolras gently, he said to him, 'Will you permit it?'Enjolras shook his hand with a smile.The smile had not finished before the report was heard.Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained backed up against the wall is if the bullets had nailed him there. Except that his head was tilted. Grantaire, struck down, collapsed at his feet.
Victor Hugo
Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one...
Anaïs Nin
Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.
Jean Genet
Zhuang Zhu also meant that the feet as such are small pieces of space, but their vocation (‘walking’) is to articulate the world’s space. The size of the foot, the gap between the legs, have no role, are never lined up anywhere. But they measure all the rest. Our feet form a compass that has no useful function, apart from evaluating distance. The legs survey. Their stride constitutes a serviceable measurement.
Frédéric Gros
Saintliness is very odd. When people encounter it, they often take it for something else, something completely unlike it: indifference, mockery, scheming, coldness, insolence, perhaps even contempt. But they're mistaken, and that makes them furious. They commit an awful crime. This is doubtless the reason why most saints end up as martyrs.
Philippe Claudel
Though sleep is called our best friend, it is a friend who often keeps us waiting!
Jules Verne