Quotes by French Authors - Page 9

Is one to die voluntarily or to hope in spite of everything?
Albert Camus
Our wisdom comes from our experience,and our experience comes from our foolishness.
Sacha Guitry
I have no ideas, myself! Not a one! there's nothing more vulgar, more common, more disgusting than ideas! libraries are loaded with them! and every sidewalk cafe!...the impotent are bloated with ideas!...they dazzle youth with ideas! they play the pimp!...and youth is ever ready, as you know, Professor, to gobble up anything, to go OOH! and AAH! by the numbers! How those pimps have an easy job of it! the passionate years of youth are spent getting a hard on and gargling ideeaas!...philosophies, if you prefer!...yes sir, philosophies! youth loves sham just as young dogs love those sticks, like bones, that we throw and they run after! they race forward, yipping away, wasting their time, that's the main thing!
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
I'm sick and tired of having a forest and a torture chamber in my house... I want to have a nice quiet flat with ordinary doors and windows and a wife inside it, like anybody else!
Gaston Leroux
Where no plan is laid where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident chaos will soon reign.
Victor Hugo
People who know me know I'm strong, but I'm vulnerable.
Catherine Deneuve
Unfinishedness avoids the stupidity of conclusions
Pierre Senges
Victorious troops are those who kill more, and here we were the victims. This put the finishing touch to our demoralisation. The soldiers had lost conviction long ago. Now they lost confidence.
Gabriel Chevallier
Do not inquire he name if him who asks a shelter of you. The very man who's embarrassed by his name is the one who needs shelter
Victor Hugo
Man never rises to great truths without enthusiasm.
Vauvenargues
Is it possible that mathematical pathology, i.e. chaos, is health? And that mathematical health, which is the predictability and differentiability of this kind of a structure, is disease?
Arnold Mandel
... so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.
Marcel Proust
I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire.
Marguerite Yourcenar
People stop thinking when they cease to read.
Denis Diderot
If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.
Napoléon Bonaparte
The present is always the best, even when its rough.
Julien Torma
The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.
Victor Hugo
Words like eyeglasses blur everything that they do not make clear.
Joseph Joubert
The golden era of the golden number was the Italian renaissance. The expression divine proportion was coined by the great mathematician Luca Pacioli in his book 'De divina proportione', written in 1509.
Midhat Gazale
Compulsive reading relieves the anxiety that comes from tramping through the forest of meditation in search of clearings.
Sylvain Tesson
And as we know from the pilgrimage diaries of Swami Ramdas, it is when we renounce everything that everything is given to us, in abundance. Everything: meaning the intensity of presence itself.
Frédéric Gros
Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.
Emil M. Cioran
I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
Anaïs Nin
The judge speaks in the name of justice,' he said. 'The priest speaks in the name of pity, which is only a higher form of justice.' (Bishop Myriel)
Victor Hugo
Dictionaries stop where the heart starts.
David Foenkinos
There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
Gustave Flaubert
To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...?
Roland Barthes
In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.
Marc Chagall
...we ought not meanwhile to make use of doubt in the conduct of life.
René Descartes
I prefer an accommodation vice to an obstinate virtue.
Molière
Everything is alive, everything is in motion, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays that emanate from me or from others flow directly through the infinite chain of creation whose transparent network is in continuous communication with the planets and the stars. A captive here on earth for the moment, I commune with the chorus of stars and they join in my sorrows and joys.
Gérard de Nerval
The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.
Auguste Comte
When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy.
Simone Weil
[…] there exists around the written world opened by the work a multitude of other possible worlds, which we can complete by means of our images and our words. Denying oneself this work of completion in the name of some hypothetical fidelity to the work is bound to fail: we can indeed reject filling these gaps in a conscious way, but we cannot prevent our unconscious from finishing the work, according to its priorities and those of the era in which it was written.
Pierre Bayard
Faith assuages guides restores.
Arthur Rimbaud
To be moved confuses the soul. One cannot convey these kinds of memories any more than the events of a dream......if I have complained too long, it is because my memory, no longer having any fixed abode, has to carry its luggage with it.
Jean Cocteau
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between her work and her play; her labor and her leisure; her mind and her body; her education and her recreation. She hardly knows which is which. She simply pursues her vision of excellence through whatever she is doing, and leaves others to determine if she is working or playing. To herself, she always appears to be doing both.
Francois Rene De Chateaubriand
[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
To know your way round a library is to master the whole of culture, i.e. the whole world.
Sophie Divry
Mais, dans la mort d’un homme, un monde inconnu meurt, et je me demandais quelles étaient les images qui sombraient en lui.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
Albert Camus
Is religion defending our physical integrity or is it just opposed to fashion?
Marjane Satrapi
THE MAIN DUTY OF LAW enforcement is law breaking. Right now the disciplined forces jobs are the reserve of the ‘elite’ and security has little meaning, money is the arbiter of law breaking.
Vincent de Paul
My dear young lady, when you are in love, and jealous, and have been flogged by the Inquisition, there's no knowing what you may do.
Voltaire
When we try to express communion with God in words, we rapidly reach the end of our capacities. But in the depths of our being Christ is praying for more than we imagine. Compared to the immensity of that hidden prayer of Christ in us, our explicit praying dwindles to almost nothing. That is why silence is so essential in discovery the heart of prayer.Although God never stops trying to communicate with us, God never stops trying to communicate with us, God never wants to impose anything on us. Often God's voice comes in a whisper, in a breath of silence. Remaining in silence in God's presence, open to the Spirit, is already prayer.It is not a matter of trying to obtain inner silence at all costs by following some method that creates a kind of emptiness within. The important thing is a childlike attitude of trust by which we allow Christ to pray within us silently, and then one day, we will discover that the depths of our being ar inhabited by a Presence.
Taizé
Ah; but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! —Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the skeptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament illumined no longer by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.
Charles Baudelaire
Better is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
Let us make our way through these low valleys of the humble and little virtues. We shall see in them the roses amid the thorns, charity that shows its beauty among interior and exterior afflictions, the lilies of purity.
Francis de Sales
Champagne arrived in flûtes on trays, and we emptied them with gladness in our hearts… for when feasts are laid and classical music is played, where champagne is drunk once the sun has sunk and the season of summer is alive in spicy bloom, and beautiful women fill the room, and are generous with laughter and smiles… these things fill men’s hearts with joy and remind one that life’s bounty is not always fleeting but can be captured, and enjoyed. It is in writing about this scene that I relive this night in my soul.
Roman Payne
When we are sick our virtues and our vices are in abeyance.
Vauvenargues
If they want peace nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon-shots.
Napoleon
In another world,' he said, lowering his voice; I remember... was it not in another world, in a life which was not in thrall to sleep and its phantoms?...
Charles Nodier
We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.
Anaïs Nin
We give advice but we do not inspire conduct.
La Rochefoucauld
I assert nothing, I content myself with believing that more is possible than people think.
Voltaire
Our nature consists in motion complete rest is death.
Blaise Pascal
The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.
Roland Barthes
...it's a mistake to think that happiness is the goal. I'm not sure I understand." "I was referring to the goals which you in your civilization are so good at setting yourselves, and which incidentally allow you to achieve many interesting things. But happiness is a different thing altogether. If you try to achieve it, you have every chance of failing. And besides, how would you ever know that you achieved it? Of course one can't blame people, especially unhappy people, for wanting to be happier and setting themselves goals in order to try to escape from their unhappiness.
François Lelord
And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys through the realms of time.
Marcel Proust