Quotes by French Authors - Page 111

Do you know how I picture God myself?" he said. "As an enormous, creative organ beyond our ken, who scatters millions of worlds into space, just as one single fish would deposit its spawn in the sea. He creates because it is His function as God to do so, but He does not know what He is doing and is stupidly prolific in His work and is ignorant of the combinations of all kinds which are produced by His scattered germs.
Guy de Maupassant
Yes, but I say that Nature is our enemy, that we must always fight against Nature, for she is continually bringing us back to an animal state. You may be sure that God has not put anything on this earth that is clean, pretty, elegant or accessory to our ideal; the human brain has done it.
Guy de Maupassant
After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover...in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought.
Michel Foucault
There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race of men with the sensation of their own ephemeral insignificance and drives them mad.
Gabriel Chevallier
I say, indeed: "consolation in the nonsentience of nature." For nonsentience is consoling; the world of nonsentience is the world outside human life; it is eternity; "it is the sea gone off with the sun" (Rimbaud).
Milan Kundera
Gula and Cali lie on their sides, their tiny adder-mouths showing the pink of their palates, their bodies throbbing with lustful and obscene dreams. The sky releases its burden of sun and color. Eyes closed, Catherine takes the long fall that carries her deep into herself, down where some animal stirs gently, breathing like a god.
Albert Camus
Nature loves death: she will not punish it.
Guy de Maupassant
A meadow is nothing but a field of suffering. Every second some creature is dying in the gorgeous green expanse, ants eat wriggling earthworms, birds lurk in the sky to pounce on a weasel or a mouse. You see that black cat, standing motionless in the grass. She is only waiting for an opportunity to kill. I detest all that naïve respect for nature. 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 human, because otherwise they couldn’t bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror and nothing but horror.
Milan Kundera
What a space between men their spiritual natures create! A girl’s reverie isolates her from me, and how shall I enter it? What can one know of a girl that passes, slow steps homeward, out of thoughts, she can form an empire, locked up in her language, in the singing echoes of her memory. Born yesterday of the volcanoes, of greenswards, of brine of the sea, she walks here already half divine.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The Golden Number is a mathematical definition of a proportional function which all of nature obeys, whether it be a mollusk shell, the leaves of plants, the proportions of the animal body, the human skeleton, or the ages of growth in man.
R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz
I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers
Claude Monet
All things can be deadly to us, even the things made to serve us; as in nature walls can kill us, and stairs can kill us, if we do not walk circumspectly.
Blaise Pascal
Nature can counsel nothing but crime.
Charles Baudelaire
...and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.
Gustave Flaubert
The time of man is coming, and of this I am certain: neither death, nor life, nor the spirits, nor the present, nor the future, nor the stars, nor the abyss, nor any creature: nothing will keep from love those who live in our land, and by our land. The time of man is coming─men who will know the nobility of forests and the grace of trees, men who will know how to contemplate and heal and, lastly, how to love.
Muriel Barbery
Killing is decreed by law but nature loves eternal youth. Whatever she does, however unconscious and unfeeling the act, she seems to cry out: ‘Quick! Quick! Quick!’ And the more she destroys, the more she is renewed.
Guy de Maupassant
Having spent a long time in open spaces, whether sea or desert, it is a luxury to be able to take refuge in towns with narrow streets which provide a fragile fortress against the assaults of the infinite. There is such a sense of security against the boundless there, even if the murmur of the wave or the silence of the sands still pursue one through tortuous corridors. The winds, despite their subtle spirits, are themselves lost in the vestibules of this labyrinth and, unable to find a way through, whistle and turn in turbulence like demented dervishes. They will not break through the walls of this den in which life still pulsates in the shadows of humanity's black sun.
Georges Limbour
The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations.
Jean Lorrain
I thought that there could be no revolt against nature. I accepted the landscape without dreaming that, behind, there still prowled large skeletons without fur. With just one sign, I thought I was able to make them rise up outside their refuges...
Roger Vitrac
People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.
Gustave Flaubert
Nature was quick to pass the sponge of her deluges over these awkward sketches (dinosaurs), these first nightmares of Life.
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.
Charles Baudelaire
The peasant is the only species of human being who doesn't like the country and never looks at it.
Jules Renard
Don't you remember that love, like medicine, is only the art of encouraging nature?
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Respect the man of noble races other than your own, who carries out, in a different place, a combat parallel to yours -- to ours. He is your ally. He is our ally, be he at the other end of the world.Love all living things whose humble task is not opposed in any way to yours, to ours: men with simple hearts, honest, without vanity and malice, and all the animals, because they are beautiful, without exception and without exception indifferent to whatever "idea" there may be. Love them, and you will see the eternal in the glance of their eyes of jet, amber, or emerald. Love also the trees, the plants, the water that runs though the meadow and on to the sea without knowing where it goes; love the mountain, the desert, the forest, the immense sky, full of light or full of clouds; because all these exceed man and reveal the eternal to you.
Savitri Devi
Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.
Michel Foucault
It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.
Michel de Montaigne
Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy…Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.
Marquis de Sade
Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance and her sunlight, from before human cruelty or suffering. She overwhelms man by the contrast between divine beauty and social hideousness. She spares him nothing of her loveliness, neither wing or butterfly, nor song of bird; in the midst of murder, vengeance, barbarism, he must feel himself watched by holy things; he cannot escape the immense reproach of universal nature and the implacable serenity of the sky. The deformity of human laws is forced to exhibit itself naked amidst the dazzling rays of eternal beauty. Man breaks and destroys; man lays waste; man kills; but the summer remains summer; the lily remains the lily; and the star remains the star....As though it said to man, 'Behold my work. and yours.
Victor Hugo
Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.
Charles Baudelaire
You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?'I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.'That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky.
Marcel Proust
A few days later, I found my mother beneath the tree, motionless with excitement, her head turned toward the heavens in which she would allow human religions no place.
Colette
I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.
Gustave Flaubert
Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.
Gaston Bachelard
Those honor nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything.
Blaise Pascal
There is no more sagacious animal than the Icelandic horse. He is stopped by neither snow, nor storm, nor impassable roads, nor rocks, glaciers, or anything. He is courageous, sober, and surefooted. He never makes a false step, never shies. If there is a river or fjord to cross (and we shall meet with many) you will see him plunge in at once, just as if he were amphibious, and gain the opposite bank.
Jules Verne
Endless moons, an opaque universe, thunder, tornadoes, the quaking earth. Rare moments of peace; forehead up against my knees, arms around my head, I though, I listened, I longed not to exist. but life was there, a transparent pearl, a star revolving slowly on its own axis.
Shan Sa
For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other.
Blaise Pascal
Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
On the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths,And walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat:Daydreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet.I will let the wind bathe my bare head. I will not speak,I will have no thoughts: But infinite love will mount in my soul;And I will go far, far off, like a gypsy,through the countryside - as happy as if I were a woman. "Sensation
Arthur Rimbaud
I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.
Charles Baudelaire
He was regarded merely as an eccentric employee of indifferent merit, and his post of deputy chief clerk was the highest he would ever reach. Well aware of this, he made it a rule never to show any zeal, except in special circumstances. It is true that in these cases his zeal was clothed with a spirit of vengeance directed against the whole human race—this being his second favourite occupation. Petitbidois would have liked to hold the reins of power. This being beyond his sphere, he utilized the small driblets of authority which came his way for the purpose of casting ridicule upon established law and order, by making it act as a sort of unintelligent and, if possible, malicious Providence. 'The world is an idiot place anyway,' he would say, 'so why worry? Life is just a lottery. Let us leave the decision to chance.
Gabriel Chevallier
The more goods we acquire in the temporal realm, the more intense our external work, the less accessible and farther removed is eternity. Hence the limited perspective of active and energetic people, the banality of their thought and actions.
Cioran
If the least thing goes wrong with a saddle, or clothes, or a boot, you cannot find a soul to make repairs, and the other day a cobbler answered us, 'Yes, that's right, I'm a shoemaker, and sometimes I work, but I'm not in the mood right now.
Louis-Philippe
I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman. He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved any one. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you: 'I am busy with matters of consequence!' And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man - he is a mushroom!
Antoine De Saint Exupery
- Is it their fault if they think that it’s good to work?- No, said Colin, it’s not their fault. It’s because they’ve been told : work is sacred, it’s good, it’s nice, it’s what counts before anything, and only those who work have the right to everything. The only thing is, it’s been set up so that they work all the time so they can’t take advantage of it.- But then they’re stupid, said Chloe.- Yes, they’re stupid, said Colin. That’s why they agree with those that made them believe that work is the best thing there is. That saves them from thinking and finding a way to progress and to no longer work.
Boris Vian
There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.
André Breton
Doing nothing is the hardest torture that a person can put himself through. For he is always brought face to face with his own self, which demands that he gives account for the sun which he uselessly squanders, for the springs of energy in his organism, the gold of wisdom in the mines of his brains. The masses work, slog, forget. They drink the alcohol of their sweat. Work is a flight from responsibility and God. Since the mystic beliefs have been banned from Europe, pillars of glory have been erected to rationality in order to put something in place of the cross: the French Revolution named its goddess reason, the Russians named their Moloch work. But the machine called Europe is running idle: it fills stomachs with fake bread, builds artificial houses with iron paper, the products are bad, the pay meager, and at the end of the six holy work days is the unholy Sunday which one sleeps through out of fear of the great boredom which is infecting Europe. Sunday, the day of idleness, is nowadays a punishment for Christianity, the cities collapse into soulless ruins, nature is just a backdrop for dusty sports. Doing nothing out of principle, my dear, is nowadays the most violent form of revolt.
Iwan Goll
The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.
Hilaire Belloc
Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.
Voltaire
Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.
Honoré de Balzac
Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.
Victor Hugo
Even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished animals in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this basis that we are "human" with them.
Jean Baudrillard
I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They'll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers. After that robust description, I should guess there will be no more to say on the subject.
Albert Camus
Every ideal comes from us as do all the amenities of life, in order to make our existence as simple reproducers, for which divine Providence solely intended us, less monotonous and less hard.
Guy de Maupassant
Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather, at the very source of its life! To confound this lust in man with that desire which unites the sexes is like confusing a tumor with the very organ which it devours, a tumor whose very deformity horribly reproduces the shape.
Georges Bernanos
All those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know.
Simone de Beauvoir
Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn - and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb.So, let us drink a cup of tea.
Muriel Barbery