Quotes by French Authors - Page 114

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself.
Marcel Proust
There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.
Louis Althusser
Reading thus introduces an "art" which is anything but passive.
Michel de Certeau
If Barthes, along with Bachelard, is one of those who have done most to enrich criticism during the last thirty years, it is not as a theoretician of a still hazy semiology, but as the champion of a new pleasure in reading.
Laurent Binet
People do not read stupidities with impunity.
Victor Hugo
I should like to write about what happens when fictive people encounter and are embellished by real people.
Jean Giono
When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.
Blaise Pascal
Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved
Milan Kundera
I am a man without many pleasures in life, a man whose few pleasures are small, but a man whose small pleasures are very important to him. One of them is eating. One reading. Another reading while eating.
Amanda Filipacchi
...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.
Roland Barthes
As for me, I feel myself living and thinking in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives profoundly different from mine, of a taste opposite to mine, where I find nothing of my conscious thought, where my imagination is excited by feeling itself plunged into the depths of the non-ego; I feel happy only when setting foot—on the Avenue de la Gare, on the Port, or on the Place de l'Eglise—in one of those provincial hotels with cold, long corridors where the wind from outside contends successfully with the efforts of the heating system, where the detailed geographic map of the district is still the sole ornament on the walls, where each noise helps only to make the silence appear by displacing it, where the rooms keep a musty perfume which the open air comes to wash, but does not eliminate, and which the nostrils inhale a hundred times in order to bring it to the imagination, which is enchanted with it, which has it pose like a model to try to recreate it with all the thoughts and remembrances that it contains...
Marcel Proust
I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.
Montesquieu
The importance of reading, for me, is that it allows you to dream.Reading not only educates, but is relaxing and allows you to feed your imagination - creating beautiful pictures from carefully chosen words.
Eric Ripert
I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.
Julio Cortázar
Reading nurtures the soul, and an enlightened friend brings it solace.
Voltaire
I have read so many books. And yet, like most Autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of no where, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading. And then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates and no matter how often I reread the same lines they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she's been reading the menu.
Muriel Barbery
What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?
Gustave Flaubert
Reading brings us unknown friends
Honoré de Balzac
Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.
Voltaire
...those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art.
Gustave Flaubert
A man who makes a plate or a shirt or a loaf of bread or anything our great great ancestors called a work of art, has no need to try to be sincere; all he can do is practice his craft to the best of his ability. But once he starts making useless things, how can he not be sincere?
René Daumal
The map is more interesting than the territory.
Michel Houellebecq
I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled all the same because it’s never anything more.
Simone de Beauvoir
It is man who has introduced a little grace, beauty, unknown charm and mystery into creation by singing about it, interpreting it, by admiring it as a poet, idealizing it as an artist and by explaining it through science, doubtless making mistakes, but finding ingenious reasons, hidden grace and beauty, unknown charm and mystery in the various phenomena of Nature. God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude.
Guy de Maupassant
Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while working.
Henri Matisse
Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.
Pierre Bourdieu
In each painting, I think, it’s as if  God were giving up on finishing the world.
Yves Bonnefoy
No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women.
Milan Kundera
You are perfectly right in objecting to them [modern art], for this one great fault - that they have not yet had time to become old.
Alexandre Dumas
No peace is possible between the novelist and the agélaste [those who do not laugh]. Never having heard God's laughter, the agélastes are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are. But it is precisely in losing the certainty of truth and the unanimous agreement of others that man becomes an individual. The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth, neither Anna nor Karenin, but where everyone has the right to be understood, both Anna and Karenin.
Milan Kundera
Paris, however―because of her purely fortuitous beauty, because of the old things which have become a part of her, because of her entanglement of buildings and tenements―Paris yields herself in discovery as an attic beloved in our childhood gave up its secrets.
Jean Cocteau
Reality is not art, but a realist art is one that can create an integral aesthetic of reality.
André Bazin
The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word...
Jean Baudrillard
I am writing a manifesto and there's nothing I want, and yet I'm saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.
Tristan Tzara
Take a newspaper.Take some scissors.Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.Cut out the article.Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.Shake gently.Next take out each cutting one after the other.Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.The poem will resemble you.And there you are -- an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
Tristan Tzara
Long before being artists, we are artisans; and all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives on likeness and repetition, like the natural geometry which serves as its fulcrum. Fabrication works on models which it sets out to reproduce; and even when it invents, it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a new arrangement of elements already known. Its principle is that “we must have like to produce like.” In short, the strict application of the principle of finality, like that of the principle of mechanical causality, leads to the conclusion that “all is given.” Both principles say the same thing in their respective languages, because they respond to the same need.
Henri Bergson
I loved it when my heart beat quickly and erratically. Yet I found this performance, which was deeply poetic, more enjoyable.
Raymond Radiguet
Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
Frédéric Chopin
Only the painter who knows his business can create the impression that a picture was done in one stroke.
Auguste Renoir
Art is not religion, 'it doesn't even lead to religion.' But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.
Maurice Blanchot
I must have flowers, always and always.
Claude Monet
She must disappear for a time from the human surface,And sacrifice everything for this, To recreate herself from the depths of her world.
David Foenkinos
Words do not always need a destination.We can leave them behind us at the borders of feelings.Running around headless in the vague zone.And that is the privilege of artists: to live in confusion.
David Foenkinos
We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthmas, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest.
Marcel Proust
For Art alone is great:The bust survives the state, The crown the potentate.
Théophile Gautier
This intensely lyrical vision of the pregant woman in [i]Hope I[i] is set in an ambiguous context peopled with masks, death's heads and allegorical monsters such as Sin, Disease, Poverty and Death, all threatening the incipient life.
Gilles Néret
Eros and Thanatos were always the source of his inspiration, even though, from this time on, they usually appear in the guise of two simple and fundamental themes: flowers and women. These themes offered him the greatest opportunity to give a certain permanence to all that can be grasped in passing: an ephemeral sensual joy, the ecstasy of life.
Gilles Néret
Some elements appear in this picture which would be decisive in Klimt's subsequent work: for instance, the use of gold and the transformation of anatomy into ornamentation, of ornamentation into anatomy.
Gilles Néret
One can show one's contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one's life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.
Alfred Jarry
For J.-L.G., color does not exist simply to show us that a girl has blue eyes or that a certain gentleman is a member of the Legion of Honor. By necessity, a film by Godard that offers the possibility of color is going to show us something that could not be shown in black and white, a kind of voice that cannot resound ehen colors are mute.
Aragon
Art is not what you see but what you make others see
Edgar Degas
Nothing is owed to us in life, not even the innocence of a blue sky. Great art is the art of thankfulness for the abundance of every moment. Writing is a Chinese variant of this thankfulness, a courtesy to life in its cloak of nothing, lined with love.
Christian Bobin
The Fine Arts are five in number: Painting, Music, Poetry, Sculpture, and Architecture--whereof the principle branch is Confectionery.
Marie-Antoine Carême
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
Some centuries ago they had Raphael and Michael Angelo; now we have Mr. Paul Delaroche, and all because we are progre
Théophile Gautier
Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them would might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.
Paul Valéry
Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.
Milan Kundera
All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.
Marc Chagall