Quotes by French Authors - Page 124

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.
Héloïse d'Argenteuil
If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.
Michel de Montaigne
If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.
Muriel Barbery
I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you.
Milan Kundera
Two persons cannot long be friends if they cannot forgive each other's little failings.
Jean de La Bruyère
Everyone calls himself a friend, but only a fool relies on it: nothing is commoner than the name, nothing rarer than the thing.
Jean de La Fontaine
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Anaïs Nin
Don’t walk in front of me… I may not followDon’t walk behind me… I may not leadWalk beside me… just be my friend
Albert Camus
He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself alone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to prolong his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent.
Marcel Proust
There are two levers for moving man -- interest and fear.
Napoléon Bonaparte
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent,more perfect than all that a man can invent.
Roman Payne
Ô, the wine of a womanfrom heaven is sent, more perfect than allthat a man can invent.When she came to my bed and begged me with sighsnot to tempt her towards passion nor actions unwise, tI told her I’d spare her and kissed her closed eyes, then unbraided her body of its clothing disguise.While our bodies were nude bathed in candlelight fineI devoured her mouth, tender lips divine;and I drank through her thighs her feminine wine.Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent,more perfect than all that a man can invent.
Roman Payne
Your body expresses yesterday in what it wants today. If you think: yesterday I was, tomorrow I shall be, you are thinking: I have died a little. Be what you are becoming, without clinging to what you might have been, what you might yet be. Never settle. Leave definitiveness to the undecided; we don't need it.
Luce Irigaray
It is not the mere fear of punishment that restrains [man] from sin. Loving and revering God as his father, honouring and obeying Him as his master, although there were no hell, he would revolt at the very idea of offending Him.
John Calvin
The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons.
Jean Renoir
In our twenties we have conflicts. We think everything is either-or, black or white: we are caught between them and we lose all our energy in the conflicts. My answer, later on in maturity, was to do them all. Not to exclude any, not to make a choice. I wanted to be everything. And I took everything in, and the more you take in, the more strength you find waiting to accomplish things and to expand your life, instead of the other (which is what we have been taught to do) which is to look for structure and to fear change, above all to fear change. Now I didn't fear change.
Anaïs Nin
It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.
Louise Bourgeois
Quand tu veux construire un bateau, ne commence pas par rassembler du bois, couper des planches et distribuer du travail, mais reveille au sein des hommes le desir de la mer grande et large.If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.
Emil M. Cioran
Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.
Jean-Paul Sartre
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Emil M. Cioran
A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.
Joanne Harris
They found records and video-cassettes at their place, a deck of cards, a chess set. In other words, everything that's banned.
Marjane Satrapi
We have nothing to fear but fear itself
Michel de Montaigne
The truth is that you are afraid.''Afraid? I do not know all the words in the Parisian jargon, and I know not what you mean.
Alexandre Dumas
Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life.
Emil M. Cioran
We ought to be much more fearful of what we don’t know. We should really be fearful of an unconscious that inhabits us, that guides us, that influences our life and of which we don’t know the face and don’t know the message. Actually I have much less fear since I confronted fears. What’s frightening to me is people whose unconscious leads them, destroys them, and yet they will never stop and look at it. That’s the minotaur in the labyrinth, which many people never come face to face with. There was a very remarkable percussion composer, Edgar Varese, who always mocked psychology, mocked psychoanalysis, mocked psychiatry. He was satirical about it, wouldn’t have any of it. And yet his whole life pattern was self-destructive. He was an innovator and a tremendous musician. But he blocked himself. His biography is out now, and you can see the pattern. You can see this demon that was driving him, the origin of it. He seemed to be a very fearless, strong, tremendous tempered man with great force; he even looked like a Corsican bandit. But he had no power over the forces that were pushing him. That is what frightens me.
Anaïs Nin
Attianus had been right in his conjectures: the virgin gold of respect would be too soft without some alloy of fear.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Let's not be afraid...there is always a step after the last step.
Hubert Haddad
I told myself 'Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?
Guy de Maupassant
By nature independent, gay, even exuberant, seductively responsive and given to those spontaneous sallies that sparkle in the conversation of certain daughters of Paris who seem to have inhaled since childhood the pungent breath of the boulevards laden with the nightly laughter of audiences leaving theaters, Madame de Burne's five years of bondage had nonetheless endowed her with a singular timidity which mingled oddly with her youthful mettle, a great fear of saying too much, of going to far, along with a fierce yearning for emancipation and a firm resolve never again to compromise her freedom.
Guy de Maupassant
Scarcely has night arrived to undeceive, unfurling her wings of crepe (wings drained even of the glimmer just now dying in the tree-tops); scarcely has the last glint still dancing on the burnished metal heights of the tall towers ceased to fade, like a still glowing coal in a spent brazier, which whitens gradually beneath the ashes, and soon is indistinguishable from the abandoned hearth, than a fearful murmur rises amongst them, their teeth chatter with despair and rage, they hasten and scatter in their dread, finding witches everywhere, and ghosts. It is night... and Hell will gape once more.
Charles Nodier
Cruelty and fear shake hands together. An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
Honoré de Balzac
Fear is a sign to prepare yourself, not to stop.
Eric Valli
Being afraid is the worst sin there is.
Jean-Paul Belmondo
The peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the night, and our laugh is always proportioned to the fear we have had.
Victor Hugo
the one thing we owe absolutely to God is never to be afraid of anything.
Charles de Foucauld
None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.
Ferdinand Foch
It is of men, and of them only, that one should always be frightened.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The thing I fear most is fear.
Michel de Montaigne
There's no better cure for the fear of taking after one's father, than not to know who he is.
André Gide
Would that thy love, beloved, had less trust in me, that it might be more anxious!
Héloïse d'Argenteuil
You see, the strangeness of my case is that now I no longer fear the invisible, I’m terrified by reality.
Jean Lorrain
At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked women, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remaining separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waver
Gustave Flaubert
To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have welded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on the condition that they may be insipid.
Georges Bataille
I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?
Guy de Maupassant
A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch's crown.
Victor Hugo
Neither fear nor self-interest can convert the soul. They may change the appearance, perhaps even the conduct, but never the object of supreme desire... Fear is the motive which constrains the slave; greed binds the selfish man, by which he is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust and enticed (James 1:14). But neither fear nor self-interest is undefiled, nor can they convert the soul. Only charity can convert the soul, freeing it from unworthy motives.
Bernard of Clairvaux
Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.
Anaïs Nin
Everyone believes very easily whatever he fears or desires.
Jean de La Fontaine
Fear of ridicule begets the worst cowardice.
André Gide
When we're afraid, we lose all sense of analysis and reflection. Our fear paralyzes us. Besides, fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators' repression.
Marjane Satrapi
My heart always timidly hides itself behind my mind. I set out to bring down stars from the sky, then, for fear of ridicule, I stop and pick little flowers of eloquence.
Edmond Rostand
If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right.
Jules Renard
He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.
Michel de Montaigne
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
Marie Curie
Creation is always an act of affirmation, a lust for life or activity, a restlessness accompanied by art. That art is what pleases and invigorates and mystifies me.
Jean Moreau