Quotes by French Authors - Page 116

Art is either revolution or plagiarism
Paul Gauguin
A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
Edmond de Goncourt
By being natural and sincere, one often can create revolutions without having sought them.
Christian Dior
The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.
André Breton
My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece
Claude Monet
Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
Charles Baudelaire
There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.
Marie Antoinette
Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.
Claude Monet
I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
Marcel Duchamp
The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness
Yann Arthus-Bertrand
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Émile Zola
Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Imagination governs the world.
Napoléon Bonaparte
All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.
Roman Payne
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
Anaïs Nin
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
Edgar Degas
Creativity takes courage.
Henri Matisse
A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says 'I was beaten', he does not say 'My men were beaten.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
When justice is more certain and more mild, is at the same time more efficacious.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who passed censure upon it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The whole people contracts the habits and tastes of the magistrate.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The man who has dedicated himself to the success of the protect, the master builder, no longer has any freedom: his conduct is now determined altogether by the constraining force of the end. Logically, therefore, he is bound to require at every moment from his companions whatever will best serve that end, and he demands of them imperiously whatever he thinks is of that nature. This imperiousness, though to immediate view that of the master, springs ultimately from the project itself, for it is the project which is in command. In the eyes of those under him, however, it is the master who hustles them, and they think him inhuman by reason of his disregard of their moods and personalities and his inability to see them other than as servants of the project (like himself).
Bertrand De Jouvenel
The law of all modern states takes account of associations, whose members, in theory, pursue the common end with equal zeal. The experience of all associations proves, however, that this is not the case, and that a lively, constant and vigorous awareness of the end is found only in a minority of the associates; an association is really rather like a comet—a large tail of docile followers dragged along by a small dynamic head.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
The more routine that systematised activities are, the more nearly they are of the monotonous character seen in the habits of social animals and the less necessary are master builders; the more novel actions are, the more necessary are master builders. Dislike of the leader and the promoter, though linked emotionally to progressivism, is linked logically to total conservatism. Conversely, an authoritarian approach, natural enough in the instigator of new activities, is unjustified in the mere overseer of routines.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
Statesmen should remember that they have been elected to persuade and to lead, and not just to accept as fixed the momentary moods and pernicious prejudices of the public.
Stanley Hoffmann
I am more afraid of an army of 100 sheep led by a lion than an army of 100 lions led by a sheep
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
A leader is a dealer in hope.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.
Albert Schweitzer
For even if we have the sensation of being always surrounded by our own soul, it is not as though by a motionless prison: rather, we are in some sense borne along with it in a perpetual leap to go beyond it.
Marcel Proust
Good books do not waste our time as most people do... collect a great quantity of books, build alibrary worthy of your noble soul, andspend without stint all the money necessary for it.
Cardinal Augustin Valier
Then there was Jeannot, who was reminded of another war and who was discovering inside himself the roots of a mad hopefulness that made him want to believe that the present hour might appease the torture of memories, and he could again see the paths of his life opening up before him, paths that came to an abrupt end the day he saw his brother die. Every morning he got up to face this wound that no one could see, and he drank his wine and laughed at stories, and his soul was more bare than a rosebush in winter.
Muriel Barbery
The cats sleep for days at a time and make love from the first star until dawn. Their pleasures are fierce, and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.
Albert Camus
To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only of a single man, were it only of the most infamous of men, would be to swallow up all epics in a superior and final epic. The conscience is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts and of temptations, the furnace of dreams, the cave of the ideas which are our shame; it is the pandemonium of sophisms, the battlefield of the passions. At certain hours, penetrate within the livid face of a human being who reflects, and look at what lies behind; look into that soul, look into that obscurity. There, beneath the external silence, there are combats of giants as in Homer, mêlées of dragons and hydras, and clouds of phantoms as in Milton, ghostly labyrinths as in Dante. What a gloom enwraps that infinite which each man bears within himself, and by which he measures in despair the desires of his will, and the actions of his life!
Victor Hugo
I passionately love liberty, legality, respect for rights, but not democracy. That is what I find in the depth of my soul.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body's ecstasy.
Marguerite Yourcenar
My soul’s a burden to me, I’ve had enough of it. I’m eager to be in that country, where the sun kills every question. I don’t belong here.
Albert Camus
The green-eyed angel came in less than a half hour and fell docile as a lamb into my arms. We kissed and caressed, I met no resistance when I unlaced the strings to free her dress and fill myself in the moist and hot bed nature made between her thighs. We made love outdoors—without a roof, I like most, without stove, my favorite place, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and dripping with dew, and our love for each other was seen. Our love for the world was new.
Roman Payne
Abolishers of the soul (materialists) are necessarily abolishers of hell, they, certainly, are interested. At all events, they are people who fear to live again--lazy people.
Charles Baudelaire
Every flower is a soul blossoming in nature.
Gérard de Nerval
This was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart’s affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive and feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad.
Roman Payne
My soul, be satisfied with flowers,With fruit, with weeds even; but gather themIn the one garden you may call your own.
Edmond Rostand
I am the soul in limbo.
André Breton
But the problem is to make the soul into a monster
Arthur Rimbaud
The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.
John Calvin
Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level
Gustave Flaubert
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
Victor Hugo
But I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep shit. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity.
Michka Assayas
Our concern for victims is the secular mask of Christian love.
René Girard
The work God carries out in us,' he said after a short pause, 'is not often what we expect. A great deal of the time the Holy Spirit seems to be working backward in us and wasting time. If a lump of iron could form an idea of the file that's slowly rough-shaping it, how furious it would be! Yet that's how God shapes us. Certain saints' lives seem horribly monotonous and desolate.
Georges Bernanos
May I love Him whom to love is to live indeed.
William of Saint-Thierry
His face frankly displays his suffering, expressing it with a truly royal simplicity. At such moments even the very best people are apt to give themselves away with the kind of look which says to you more or less directly: 'You see how I'm sticking it out; don't praise me, it's my nature; thanks all the same.' But the Curé de Torcy looks straight at you, guilelessly. His eyes beg your compassion and sympathy. But with what nobility they beg! A king might beg in just that way.
Georges Bernanos
The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist will work for years to make of himself a man of prayer, and then any fool who comes along sets himself up as judge of this lifelong effort. If it were really what they suppose, a kind of chatter, the dialogue of a madman with his shadow, or even less—a vain and superstitious sort of petition to be given the good things of this world, how could innumerable people find until their dying day, I won't even say such great 'comfort'—since they put no faith in the solace of the senses—but sheer, robust, vigorous, abundant joy in prayer? Oh, of course—suggestion, say the scientists. Certainly they can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgement, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!This seems a very daring comparison. I apologise for having advanced it, yet perhaps it might satisfy many people who find it hard to think for themselves, unless the thought has first been jolted by some unexpected, surprising image. Could a sane man set himself up as a judge of music because he has sometimes touched a keyboard with the tips of his fingers? And surely if a Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony leave him cold, if he has to content himself with watching on the face of another listener the reflected pleasure of supreme, inaccessible delight, such a man has only himself to blame.But alas! We take the psychiatrists' word for it. The unanimous testimony of saints is held as of little or no account. They may all affirm that this kind of deepening of the spirit is unlike any other experience, that instead of showing us more and more of our own complexity it ends in sudden total illumination, opening out upon azure light—they can be dismissed with a few shrugs. Yet when has any man of prayer told us that prayer had failed him?
Georges Bernanos
Teaching is no joke, sonny! ... Comforting truths, they call it! Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards. Besides, you've no right to call that sort of thing comfort. Might as well talk about condolences! The Word of God is a red-hot iron. And you who preach it 'ud go picking it up with a pair of tongs, for fear of burning yourself, you daren't get hold of it with both hands. It's too funny! Why, the priest who descends from the pulpit of Truth, with a mouth like a hen's vent, a little hot but pleased with himself, he's not been preaching: at best he's been purring like a tabby-cat. Mind you that can happen to us all, we're all half asleep, it's the devil to wake us up, sometimes — the apostles slept all right at Gethsemane. Still, there's a difference... And mind you many a fellow who waves his arms and sweats like a furniture-remover isn't necessarily any more awakened than the rest. On the contrary. I simply mean that when the Lord has drawn from me some word for the good of souls, I know, because of the pain of it.
Georges Bernanos
I have often thought, during these conferences, about the comment that Maurice Maignan, one of the first companions of Ozanam, made after a retreat: "One thought strikes me. All the means of sanctification which the preacher proposes and develops require a strong soul...I will not profit from exercises designed for strong souls. O my God, show me the exercises designed for feeble souls. Would the saints have forgotten or disdained them? Yet even if the saints did not think of these poor souls, who are nevertheless most numerous, You, Lord, my mercy, have not abandoned them. You Yourself, Good Master, have burdened Yourself with them. I know that better than anyone. I am one of those souls, and I bless You for having revealed to the weak and the little ones what You do not always accord to the valiant and the strong.
Jean C.J. d'Elbée
O miracle—thus to be able to give [peace] we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands!
Georges Bernanos
We pay a heavy, very heavy price for the superhuman dignity of our calling. The ridiculous is always so near to the sublime. And the world, usually so indulgent to foibles, hates ours instinctively.
Georges Bernanos
A Christian people doesn't mean a lot of goody-goodies. The Church has plenty of stamina, and isn't afraid of sin. On the contrary, she can look it in the face calmly and even take it upon herself, assume it at times, as Our Lord did. When a good workman's been at it for a whole week, surely he's due for a booze on Saturday night. Look: I'll define you a Christian people by the opposite. The opposite of a Christian people is a people grown sad and old. You'll be saying that isn't a very theological definition. I agree...Why does our earliest childhood always seem so soft and full of light? A kid's got plenty of troubles, like everybody else, and he's really so very helpless, quite unarmed against pain and illness. Childhood and old age should be the two greatest trials of mankind. But that very sense of powerlessness is the mainspring of a child's joy. He just leaves it all to his mother, you see. Present, past, future -- his whole life is caught up in one look, and that look is a smile. Well, lad, if only they'd let us have our way, the Church might have given men that supreme comfort. Of course they'd each have their own worries to grapple with, just the same. Hunger, thirst, poverty, jealousy -- we'd never be able to pocket the devil once and for all, you may be sure. But man would have known he was the son of God; and therein lies your miracle. He'd have lived, he'd have died with that idea in his noddle -- and not just a notion picked up in books either -- oh, no! Because we'd have made that idea the basis of everything: habits and customs, relaxation and pleasure, down to the very simplest needs. That wouldn't have stopped the labourer ploughing, or the scientist swotting at his logarithms, or even the engineer making his playthings for grown-up people. What we would have got rid of, what we would have torn from the very heart of Adam, is that sense of his own loneliness...God has entrusted the Church to keep [the soul of childhood] alive, to safeguard our candour and freshness... Joy is the gift of the Church, whatever joy is possible for this sad world to share... What would it profit you even to create life itself, when you have lost all sense of what life really is?
Georges Bernanos
To adore, one must be an inferior. But the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity are equal; none is superior, none is inferior. The Son equal in all things to the Father may love the Father; He cannot adore Him.Desiring to give to His Father a divinely conceived form of love, the Word decreed to become man. Equal to the Father, He will become inferior to Him, not as God, but as man; and thus, He will be able to adore Him. In heaven, He cannot adore; on earth He can.... Even had Adam not sinned, the Word would still have become man. ... the motive for which the Word came upon earth was the adoration that He wished to give to His Father. The expiation of sin was but secondary in the divine plan....By coming upon earth, the Word loses none of His sovereign majesty. He becomes less than the Father, but He remains the Infinite. Less than the Father, He can adore Him; infinite, He can adore Him infinitely. Since the Word became man, there is on this little earth of ours one who is capable of giving to the infinite God an infinite adoration: the Word of God made flesh.
Raoul Plus
The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions.This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims....The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc.Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious...Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions. This idea acquires a semblance of credibility in the limited domain of consumer goods, whose prodigious multiplication, thanks to technological progress, weakens certain mimetic rivalries. The weakening of mimetic rivalries confers an appearance of plausibility, but only that, on the stance that turns the moral law into an instrument of repression and persecution.
René Girard
The power of loving a God whom religion paints as the most detestable of beings would, doubtless, be a proof of the most supernatural grace, that is, a grace the most contrary to nature; to love that which we do not know, is, assuredly, sufficiently difficult; to love that which we fear, is still more difficult; but to love that which is exhibited to us in the most repulsive colors, is manifestly impossible.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach