Quotes by French Authors - Page 7

We magistrates find that reason is the easiest thing in the world to dispense with; banished from our law courts as it is from our heads, we delight in trampling it underfoot, and that is what makes our judicial sentences such masterpieces, since (although commonsense never presides in them) those sentences are carried out with as much firmness as if people knew what they actually meant.
Marquis de Sade
When you got right down to it, my dick was the one organ that hadn’t presented itself to my consciousness through pain, only pleasure. Modest but robust, it had always served me faithfully. Or, you could argue, I had served it – if so, its yoke had been easy. It never gave me orders. It sometimes encouraged me to get out more, but it encouraged me humbly, without bitterness or anger. This past evening, I knew, it had interceded on Myriam’s behalf. It had always enjoyed good relations with Myriam, Myriam had always treated it with affection and respect, and this had given me an enormous amount of pleasure. And sources of pleasure were hard to come by. In the end, my dick was all I had.
Michel Houellebecq
Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect
George Sand
Men argue nature acts.
Voltaire
Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
Anatole France
Here we are in the century of information, that is to say the unformed. Every kind of literature will be journalistic, with a science for ballast.
Julien Torma
I fell in love with you because there was a mischief in your eyes.
Michka Assayas
You must realize that men make war as much with the enthusiasm of those who want it as with the despair of those who reject it with all their soul.
Albert Camus
In particular those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest. This notion we reject, for our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out towards other liberties. There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-sois’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and of liberty into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.
Simone de Beauvoir
People do not read stupidities with impunity.
Victor Hugo
In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
Simone Weil
an old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past.
Milan Kundera
There are those to whom one must advise madness.
Joseph Joubert
The method of addition is quite charming if it involves adding to the self such things as a cat, a dog, roast pork, love of the sea or of cold showers. But the matter becomes less idyllic if a person decides to add love for communism, for the homeland, for Mussolini, for Roman Catholicism or atheism, for fascism or anti-fascism. In both cases the method remains exactly the same: a person stubbornly defending the superiority of cats over other animals is doing basically the same thing as one who maintains that Mussolini was the sole saviour of Italy: he is proud of this attribute of the self and he tries to make this attribute (a cat or Mussolini) acknowledged and loved by everyone.Here is that strange paradox to which all people cultivating the self by way of the addition method are subject: they use addition in order to create a unique, inimitable self, yet because they automatically become propagandists for the added attributes, they are actually doing everything in their power to make as many others as possible similar to themselves; as a result, their uniqueness (so painfully gained) quickly begins to disappear.
Milan Kundera
Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
Blaise Pascal
It's okay to dream, but remember to plan when you wake up.
G.C. Julien
Cowardice is the mother of cruelty.
Michel de Montaigne
At thirty a man should know himself like the palm of his hand know the exact number of his defects and qualities. ... And above all accept these things.
Albert Camus
He was in that stage of love–and of liquor–where one is completely taken up with oneself, and can get along very well without the other party.
Françoise Sagan
Tell me who admires and loves you and I will tell you who you are.
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve
In primary school, there are kids who learn their conjugations and their multiplication tables. Me, I learned something more useful: the strong get off on walking all over other people, and wiping their feet while they're at it, like you would on a doormat.
Marie-Sabine Roger
I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. Italways made me want to do just the opposite.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Calumniate calumniate there will always be something which sticks.
Pierre Beaumarchais
At last she sighed."But the most wretched thing — is it not? — is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.
Gustave Flaubert
As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
Simone de Beauvoir
There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.
André Gide
... Paris was no more Babylon than it was New Jerusalem. All cities worthy of that name were both: they were one because they were the other...
Jean-Christophe Valtat
Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small minded.Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas,—this is the very struggle of progress.
Victor Hugo
Time is a great manager: it arranges things well.
Pierre Corneille
Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up to the portholes. But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day, and she would listen to every sound, spring to her feet, feel surprised that it had not come; then at sunset, always more sorrowful, she would wish the next day were already there.
Gustave Flaubert
The intellect is always fooled by the heart.
François de La Rochefoucauld
So you realized that there were always women in tears, or a red-headed man, or something else to spoil your effects?""Yes, naturally.
Jean-Paul Sartre
If you love my work, you are a good critic. If you do not love my work, you are a 'not good' critic.
Roman Payne
No one ought even to desert a woman after throwing her a heap of gold in her distress! He ought to love her forever! You are young, only twenty-one, and kind and upright and fine. You'll ask me how a woman can take money from a man. Oh, God, isn't it natural to share everything with the one we owe all our happiness to? When one has given everything, how can one quibble about a mere portion of it? Money is important only when feeling has ceased. Isn't one bound for life? How can you foresee separation when you think someone loves you? When a man swears eternal love--how can there be any separate concerns in that case?
Honoré de Balzac
There is something almost insane about countries without common borders going to war, something unnatural.
Stéphane Audeguy
For him, too, starting over, departures, a new life had a certain luster, but he knew that only the impotent and the lazy attach happiness to such things. Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire. He could hear Zagreus: "Not the will to renounce, but the will to happiness.
Albert Camus
A single word often betrays a great design.
Jean Baptiste Racine
But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
History is full of religious wars; but, we must take care to observe, it was not the multiplicity of religions that produced these wars, it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing.
Montesquieu
We are born crying, and for good reason,' he reflected. 'And the rest of our lives is bound to be a muted reiteration of that cry.
Françoise Sagan
Hope is the Word which God has written on the brow of every man.
Victor Hugo
Even his mother, his own mother, had once accused him of being a snob.
Marcel Proust
...when an old person dies, a whole library disappears.
Simone Schwarz-Bart
To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
Jacques Derrida
The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.
Albert Camus
Commitment is an act, not a word
Jean-Paul Sartre
To win one's joy through struggle is better than to yield to melancholy.
André Gide
It was there, in particular, that I confirmed the truth that love, which we cry up as the source of our pleasures, is nothing more than an excuse for them.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
To arms! to arms! ye brave! The avenging sword unsheathe March on! march on! all hearts resolved On victory or death!
Rouget de Lisle
Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness. If they are happy by surprise, they find themselves disabled, unhappy to be deprived of their unhappiness.
Albert Camus
Oh! Let us never never doubt What nobody is sure about.
Hilaire Belloc
He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself alone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to prolong his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent.
Marcel Proust
He had a reputation in society as a man with a lively wit, whose gaiety was pleasant and formidable – which all gaiety must be in a society which would despise you if, while amusing it, you did not make it tremble a little. ("A Woman's Vengeance")
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
There isn't a man on earth who doesn't at times pronounce an opinion on good and evil, even if it be only to find fault with somebody else.
Simone Weil
You are never fully dressed until you put on a smile!
Les Miserables
When the owl sings, the night is silent. (Quand le hibou chante, La nuit est silence)
Charles de Leusse
Do not suppose opportunity will knock twice at your door.
Sebastien Chamfort
The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.... That’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.
Jean Baudrillard