Quotes by French Authors - Page 113

Well, that's history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who weren't even there.
Joanne Harris
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
Napoléon Bonaparte
But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others...Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this, this is forever.
Irène Némirovsky
Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.
Victor Hugo
History is written by the winners.
Napoléon Bonaparte
History is a set of lies agreed upon.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality.
Milan Kundera
To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.
Napoléon Bonaparte
We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed. Even the most voluminous archives cannot help.
Milan Kundera
If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
Albert Camus
The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.
Charles Baudelaire
The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for an important change in the native. Perhaps we haven't sufficiently demonstrated that colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today.
Frantz Fanon
This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.
Victor Hugo
It is quite rare for God to provide a great man at the necessary moment to carry out some great deep, which is why when this unusual combination of circumstance does occur, history at once records the name of the chosen one and recommends him to the admiration of posterity.
Alexandre Dumas
History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.
Victor Hugo
From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. (1850)
Gustave Flaubert
Colinialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natrual resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country's industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply.
Frantz Fanon
Well, that's history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who weren't even there.
Joanne Harris
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
Napoléon Bonaparte
But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others...Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this, this is forever.
Irène Némirovsky
Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.
Victor Hugo
History is written by the winners.
Napoléon Bonaparte
History is a set of lies agreed upon.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Just is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent an is afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by boors and 'bounders' that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated. Three-fourths of the mental ingenuity displayed, of the social falsehoods scattered broadcast ever since the world began by people whose importance they have served only to diminish, have been aimed at inferiors.
Marcel Proust
Herein is a capital truth. It is not the natural capacity, the congenital gift, nor is it the effort, the will, the work, which in the intelligence as sway over the energy capable of making it fully efficacious. It is uniquely the desire, that is, the desire for beauty. This desire, given a certain degree of intensity and purity, is the same thing as genius. At all levels it is the same thing as attention. If this were understood, the whole conception of teaching would be quite other than it is. First, one would realize that the intelligence functions only in joy. Intelligence is perhaps even the only one of our faculties to which joy is indispensible. The absence of joy asphyxiates it.
Simone Weil
What is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies. The fact of being quick or slow isn’t really relevant.
Laurent Schwartz
It takes a very great intelligence to breathe logical meaning into meaningless ideas.
Milan Kundera
The human mind is a lucky little local, passing accident which was totally unforeseen, and condemned to disappear with this earth and to recommence perhaps here or elsewhere the same or different with fresh combinations of eternally new beginnings. We owe it to this little lapse of intelligence on His part that we are very uncomfortable in this world which was not made for us, which had not been prepared to receive us, to lodge and feed us or to satisfy reflecting beings, and we owe it to Him also that we have to struggle without ceasing against what are still called the designs of Providence, when we are really refined and civilized beings.
Guy de Maupassant
Imitation is human intelligence in its most dynamic aspect.
René Girard
The best minds have their soft spots and sometimes feel somewhat bruised by the scant respect of logic.
Victor Hugo
Intelligence is perhaps but a malady, -a beautiful malady; the oysters's pearl.
Rémy de Gourmont
It was an accident that has endowed man with intelligence. He has made use of it: he invented stupidity.
Rémy de Gourmont
Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
Gustave Flaubert
We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.
Muriel Barbery
I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.
Blaise Pascal
Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.
Victor Hugo
Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
Marie Curie
The spirit of the way is surely there, in the wish to wander through the world in order to escape it and to find others where there is nobody.
Jean-Christophe Rufin
Doost", Ahmed voiced. "Doost",he repeated softly,shutting his eyes.The word felt like a caress."what does it mean?"'It means "The Friend","The One I Love","the One I Long For".
Muriel Maufroy
Even as it clouds our corporeal vision, intoxication clarifies our spiritual vision. The mind, set free from the heavy bondage of the body, flees away like a prisoner whose guard has fallen asleep, leaving the keys at the prison gate.
Gérard de Nerval
Ultimately, we can really forgive people only because Christ rose from the dead; his Resurrection is the guarantee that God can cure every wrong and every hurt.
Jacques Philippe
The wind of God is always blowing... but you must hoist your sail.
François Fénelon
let us thank God for having made us this gift of death, so that life is to have meaning; of night, that day is to have meaning; silence, that speech is to have meaning; illness, that health is to have meaning; war, that peace is to have meaning. Let us give thanks to Him for having given us weariness and pain, so that rest and joy are to have meaning. Let us give thanks to him, whose wisdom is infinite.
Amin Maalouf
The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and life-giving. It is an immense desert place where man is never lonely, for he senses the weaving of Creation on every hand. It is the physical embodiment of a supernatural existence... For the sea is itself nothing but love and emotion. It is the Living Infinite, as one of your poets has said. Nature manifests herself in it, with her three kingdoms: mineral, vegetable, and animal. The ocean is the vast reservoir of Nature.
Jules Verne
What we need to understand is that books weren't written so that young people could write essays about them, but so that they could read them if they really wanted to.Knowledge, academic track record, career, and social life are one thing. Our intimacy and cultural awareness as readers are quite another.
Daniel Pennac
Rather than allowing a book's intelligence to speak through our mouths, we replace it with our own intelligence as we talk about it. Rather than acting as emissary for the book, we become guardians of the temple, boasting of its wonders in the very words that slam shut it's doors: Reading matters! Reading matters!
Daniel Pennac
Reassured, we left their bedroom without understanding-- or wanting to admit-- that what a child learns first isn't the act but the gestures that accompany the act. And although it may also help them learn, this ostentatious show of reading is primarily intended to reassure them and please us.
Daniel Pennac
We see that that ritual of reading every evening at the end of the bed when they were so little--set time, set gestures-- was like a prayer.
Daniel Pennac
Our children start out as good readers and will remain so if the adults around them nourish their enthusiasm instead of trying to prove themselves. If we stimulate their desire to learn before making them recite out loud; if we support them in their efforts instead of trying to catch them out; if we give up whole evenings instead of trying to save time; if we make the present come alive without threatening them with the future; if we refuse to turn pleasure into a chore but nurture it instead. If we do all this, we ourselves will rediscover the pleasure of giving freely-- because all cultural apprenticeship is free.
Daniel Pennac
If reading isn't about communication, it is, in the end, about sharing. But a deferred and fiercely selective kind of sharing.
Daniel Pennac
Time to read is always time stolen. (Like time to write, for that matter, or time to love).Stolen from what?From the tyranny of living.
Daniel Pennac
We human beings build houses because we're alive, but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable, but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place, but that no one can replace either.
Daniel Pennac
Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back by laying bare; it does not comprehend (strictly speaking), it attends. A marvelous innocence.
Maurice Blanchot
I rushed to the living room to protect myself from I don't know what, behind my best friend, a book.
Marjane Satrapi
There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all. For any given reader, however dedicated he might be, such total abstention necessarily holds true for virtually everything that has been published, and thus in fact this constitutes our primary way of relating to books. We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist.
Pierre Bayard
What we are able to say about our intimate relation with a book will have more force if we have not thought about it excessively. Instead, we need only let our unconscious express itself within us and give voice, in this privileged moment of openness in language, to the secret ties that bind us to the book, and therefore to ourselves.
Pierre Bayard
I never knew a sorrow that an hour of reading could not assuage, a great man had once said. Let's put it to the test.
Anna Gavalda
There is something of the ghoul in the page-swallower and of the novel-reader in the stroller through cemeteries.
Régis Debray