Quotes by French Authors - Page 118

When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?
Muriel Barbery
To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
Simone de Beauvoir
A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Milan Kundera
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
Albert Camus
Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.
Charles Baudelaire
Women think of all colors except the absence of color. I have said that black has it all. White too. Their beauty is absolute. It is the perfect harmony.
Coco Chanel
You can be gorgeous at thirty, charmimg at forty, and irresistible for the rest of your life.
Coco Chanel
A whole nation cannot rise above itself.
Alexis de Tocqueville
A central administration enervates the nations in which it exists by incessantly diminishing their public spirit. If such an administration succeeds in convincing all the disposable resources of a people, it impairs at least the renewal of those resources.
Alexis de Tocqueville
This is one secret in living with the loved one. That is, it doesn't try to change the other party.
Jacques Chardonne
We do not have feelings which change us, but feelings that suggest to us the idea of change. Thus love does not purge us of selfishness, but makes us aware of it and gives us the idea of a distant country where this selfishness will disappear.
Albert Camus
I marvel at the placidity of the Utopian who imagines that man is perfectible. There is no denying that the human creature is born selfish, abusive, vile. Just look around you and see. Society cynical and ferocious, the humble heckled and pillaged by the rich traffickers in necessities. Everywhere the triumph of the mediocre and unscrupulous, everywhere the apotheosis of crooked politics and finance. And you think you can make any progress against a stream like that? No, man has never changed. His soul was corrupt in the days of Genesis and is not less rotten at present. Only the form of his sins varies. Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
This is my thesis: Do you know what is needful to turn an honest man into a rogue! A change of scene--a moment's forgetfulness suffice.
André Gide
Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion.
Jean Cocteau
In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.
Arthur Rimbaud
For him, too, starting over, departures, a new life had a certain luster, but he knew that only the impotent and the lazy attach happiness to such things. Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire. He could hear Zagreus: "Not the will to renounce, but the will to happiness.
Albert Camus
To wipe out abuse is not enough; you have to change people's whole outlook. The mill is no longer standing, but the wind's still there, blowing away.
Victor Hugo
I am not a good enough writer to convey the intense emotion I felt over my newfound self-respect. It was a rehabilitation, if not a new life. This imaginary baptism, the immersion in purity, the elevation of my being above the filth in which I'd been mired and, overnight, this sense of responsibility, made me into a different man. The convict's complexes that make him hear his chains and suspect he's being watched even after he's freed, everything I'd seen, gone through, suffered, everything that was making me tarnished, rotten and dangerous, passively obedient on the surface but terribly dangerous in rebellion, all that had disappeared as if by a miracle.
Henri Charrière
When I started off, I believed that the true determinant of how great I was was through my lifestyle, wardrobe, the type of car I drove, being seen with the right people; and if I made it unscathed, the estates I would own, and how the media would be singing my name like Urbanas’s. I saw my father apologizing for not supporting me. But life is a twisty bastard. When I called it quits on robbery, drugs, hedonism, and paedophilia and most probably necromancy—the ‘scarletest’ of sins according to me—I made a vow never to live a profane life again, not even the most subtle of snares would entrap me. I had seen them all, even in their disguises, and I knew them when I saw them.
Vincent de Paul
I was not one man only but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men.
Marcel Proust
To have a solid foundation of skepticism, -that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life.
Rémy de Gourmont
[C]hange your thinking, your interpretation of he world, change the way you see! To change the way you see is to change the world. (50)
Jean-Yves Leloup
A revolution is an idea, taken up by bayonets.
Napoléon Bonaparte
I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.
Alexis de Tocqueville
To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.
Marcel Proust
But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
Simone de Beauvoir
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
Victor Hugo
Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor
Alexis Carrel
If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.
Anatole France
Fashion changes, but style endures.
Coco Chanel
Childless people are always expected to explain themselves, although it would never occur to anyone to ask a woman why she became a mother (and to insist on getting good reasons)
Élisabeth Badinter
Men's freedom is their unfaithfulness: the Son of Heaven or the son of a peasant, they could both reduce me to the mediocre torments of a woman.
Shan Sa
In our time women can demonstrate prowess in a thousand ways. Long ago the great Princess Sun of Ping fought for her father, the August Sovereign. At her funeral, His Majesty called for the trumpets and drums to be sounded, an honor reserved for men. My dear, from this day you must dress her as a boy. Give her an education worthy of her own determination.
Shan Sa
If they're from the village, you take them to the inn. If they're from the city, you treat them with respect when they are beautiful and throw them on the highway when they are dead.
Voltaire
For you know that any evil spoken of women so generally only hurts those who say it, not women themselves.
Christine de Pizan
Do not be surprised,' she said. 'It is I, and it is not I; You shall find me again, and you shall lose me; Once more shall I come among you; for few men have seen me, and none has understood me; And you shall forget me, and you shall recognize me, and you shall forget me.
Marcel Schwob
D'Artagnan had time to reflect that women - those gentle doves - treat one another more cruelly than bears and tigers.
Alexandre Dumas
To lie is always a necessity for women; above all when they choose to deceive, falsehood becomes vital to them.
Marquis de Sade
Women naturally prefer their ideas to their sensations.
Albert Camus
Virtue will cut your head off, vice will only cut your hair.
Honoré de Balzac
As concerning marriage, besides that it is a covenant, the entrance into which only is free, but the continuance in it forced and compulsory, having another dependence than that of our own free will, and a bargain commonly contracted to other ends, there almost always happens a thousand intricacies in it to unravel, enough to break the thread and to divert the current of a lively affection: whereas friendship has no manner of business or traffic with aught but itself. Moreover, to say truth, the ordinary talent of women is not such as is sufficient to maintain the conference and communication required to the support of this sacred tie; nor do they appear to be endued with constancy of mind, to sustain the pinch of so hard and durable a knot. And doubtless, if without this, there could be such a free and voluntary familiarity contracted, where not only the souls might have this entire fruition, but the bodies also might share in the alliance, and a man be engaged throughout, the friendship would certainly be more full and perfect; but it is without example that this sex has ever yet arrived at such perfection; and, by the common consent of the ancient schools, it is wholly rejected from it.
Michel de Montaigne
we said we would be to each other as two voices, who shadows.
Alexandre Dumas
He was savoring for the first time the ineffable subtleties of feminine refinement. Never had he encountered this grace of language, this quiet taste in dress, these relaxed, dove like postures. He marveled at the sublimity of her soul and at the lace on her petticoat. With her ever-changing moods, by turns brooding and gay, chattering and silent, fiery and casual, she aroused in him a thousand desires, awakening instincts or memories. She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague "she" of all the poetry books.
Gustave Flaubert
For life is too short to resign ourselves to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women we don't love.
Anne Garréta
She was one of those women of good family who no longer exist, elegant, distinguished, and haughty, whose pallor and thinness seem to say, 'I am conquered by the era, like all my breed. I am dying, but I despise you,' and - devil take me! - plebeian as I am, and though it is not very philosophical , I cannot help finding that beautiful.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,--she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth.
Honoré de Balzac
I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.
Edmond de Goncourt
[Picasso] loved...women for the sexual, carnivorous impulses they aroused in him. Mixing blood and sperm, he exalted women in his paintings, imposed his violence on them, and sentenced them to death once he felt their mystery had been discharged and the sexual power they instilled in him had dulled... Women were his prey. He was the Minotaur. These were bloody, indecent bullfights from which he always emerged the dazzling victor.
Marina Picasso
Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
Simone Weil
Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs.
Hélène Cixous
It is not perhaps a question of truthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and not in the eyes and in the lips of others; even when the ingenuously write into little secret diaries, women think of the unknown god reading--perhaps--over their shoulders. With a similar nature, a woman, to be placed in the first ranks of men, would require even higher genius than that of the highest man; that is why, if the conspicuous works of men themselves, the finest works of women are always inferior to the worth of the women who produced them.
Rémy de Gourmont
An overwhelming curiosity makes me ask myself what their lives might be like. I want to know what they do, where they're from, their names, what they're thinking about at that moment, what they regret, what they hope for, their past loves, their current dreams ... and if they happen to be women (especially the young ones) then the urge becomes intense.How quickly would you want to see her naked, admit it, and naked through to her heart. How you try to learn where she comes from, where she's going, why she's here and not elsewhere!While letting your eyes wander all over her, you imagine love affairs for her, you ascribe her deep feelings. You think of the bedroom she must have, and a thousand things besides ... right down to the battered slippers into which she must slip her feet when she gets out of bed.
Gustave Flaubert
[A]s though mindful of the wife of Lot, who looked back from behind him, thou deliveredst me first to the sacred garments and monastic profession before thou gavest thyself to God. And for that in this one thing thou shouldst have had little trust in me I vehemently grieved and was ashamed. For I (God [knows]) would without hesitation precede or follow thee to the Vulcanian fires according to thy word. For not with me was my heart, but with thee. But now, more than ever, if it be not with thee, it is nowhere. For without thee it cannot anywhere exist.
Héloïse d'Argenteuil
A woman who spends her time worrying about pregnancy is a virtual cripple, she'll never go very far.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Because misogynists are the best of men.” All the poets reacted to these words with hooting. Boccaccio was forced to raise his voice: “Please understand me. Misogynists don’t despise women. Misogynists don’t like femininity. Men have always been divided into two categories. Worshipers of women, otherwise known as poets, and misogynists, or, more accurately, gynophobes. Worshipers or poets revere traditional feminine values such as feelings, the home, motherhood, fertility, sacred flashes of hysteria, and the divine voice of nature within us, while in misogynists or gynophobes these values inspire a touch of terror. Worshipers revere women’s femininity, while misogynists always prefer women to femininity. Don’t forget: a woman can be happy only with a misogynist. No woman has ever been happy with any of you!
Milan Kundera
[I]f you seek in every way to minimise my firm beliefs by your anti-feminist attacks, please recall that a small dagger or knife point can pierce a great, bulging sack and that a small fly can attack a great lion and speedily put him to flight.
Christine de Pizan
Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I’ve never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman.
Roman Payne
Love lasts a long time but burning desire lasts two to three weeks.
Carla Bruni
The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher; neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.
Christine de Pizan