Quotes by French Authors - Page 125

Freedom of will is our birthright.
Jean Moreau
During these past years, not being able to speak with you, I dedicated myself to reviewing, within myself, the sacred books I know by heart. I had the idea I should summarize them in a single volume. Then, in a single chapter, then in a single page, and finally in a single sentence. This sentence is the greatest thing I can teach you. It seems simple, but if you understand it, you will never have to study again." The Rabbi recited it. And life, from that moment on, changed for Alejandro. "If God is not here, He is nowhere; this instant itself is perfection.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
I am not afraid I was born to do this.
Jeanne d'Arc
Sometimes the best answer to a question is another question. Is it not by asking questions that we stimulate each other to reach more deeply into our own source and, thereby, approach the Source, both together and in our different ways? (7)
Jean-Yves Leloup
The ego is like a clever monkey, which can co-opt anything, even the most spiritual practices, so as to expand itself. (155)
Jean-Yves Leloup
Let us love. Let our lives be a perpetual song of love for God, first of all, and for all human beings who suffer, love, and mourn. Let deep joy live in us. Let us be like the lark, enemy of the night, who always announces the dawn and awakens in each creature the love of light and life. Let us awaken others to the spiritual life.
Elizabeth LeSeur
One of my confreres sketched an explanation that attracted me: since the process of digestion is under the control of the brain, its cessation gave repose to the brain, allowed it a vacation.
Adalbert de Vogüé
Playing along in the yard, The blue sky sparkles against the earthly green,Creating such harmony!A pond, nearby.Untroubled waters mirrors the ether's dreams.A grand echo of my Divine Heart!I am One
Arnaud Saint-Paul
It is only through silent awareness that our physical and mental nature can change. This change is completely spontaneous. If we make an effort to change we do no more than shift our attention from one level, from one thing, to another. We remain in a vicious circle. This only transfers energy from one point to another. It still leaves us oscillating between suffering and pleasure, each leading inevitably back to the other. Only living stillness, stillness without someone trying to be still, is capable of undoing the conditioning our biologoical, emotional and psychological nature has undergone. There is no controller, no selector, no personality making choices. In choiceless living the situation is given the freedom to unfold. You do not grasp one aspect over another for there is nobody to grasp. When you understand something and live it without being stuck to the formulation, what you have understood dissolves in your openness. In this silence change takes place of its own accord, the problem is resolved and duality ends. You are left in your glory where no one has understood and nothing has been understood.
Jean Klein
There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed, or of some duty to be performed. All that takes place within us, around us, or through us, contains and conceals His divine action.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade
The worst evil is not to commit crimes, but to fail to do the good one might have done.
Léon Bloy
You is.Within Me!We are ONE.
Arnaud Saint-Paul
I believe that around us there is only one word on all sides, one immense word which reveals our solitude and extinguishes our radiance: Nothing! I believe that that word does not point to our insignificance or our unhappiness, but on the contrary to our fulfillment and our divinity, since everything is in ourselves.
Henri Barbusse
And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anaïs Nin
O heavenly Father,protect and bless all thingsthat have breath: guard themfrom all evil and let them sleep in peace.
Albert Schweitzer
There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection.
Anaïs Nin
The sea is only the embodiment of asupernatural and wonderful existence.It is nothing but love and emotionit is the ‘Living Infinite...
Jules Verne
There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Every page should explode, either because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography.
Tristan Tzara
Books should not be loved selfishly. Neither books nor anything else, in fact.
Marie-Sabine Roger
A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with cleanunderwear—instead of being allowed to pursue something higher —stores up greatreserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over theirbooks. (...) The difference between the universitygraduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in theextent of vitality and self-confidence. The elan with which Tereza flung herself into hernew Prague existence was both frenzied and precarious. She seemed to be expectingsomeone to come up to her any day and say, What are you doing here? Go back whereyou belong!
Milan Kundera
As long as ignorance and misery exist in the world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless
Victor Hugo
This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.
Marcel Proust
In the meantime, there is not an hour to lose. I am about to visit the public library.
Jules Verne
Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.
Stéphane Mallarmé
Fictional characters exert a great deal of influence over our choices in love by representing inaccessible ideals to which we try to make others conform, usually without success. But more subtly, too, the books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.
Pierre Bayard
Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these specters.
Pierre Bayard
The title of the work, its place in the collective library, the nature of the person who tells us about it, the atmosphere established in the written or spoken exhange, among many other instances, offer alternatives to the book itself that allow us to talk about ourselves without dwelling upon the work too closely.
Pierre Bayard
that the grace of fable stirs the mind"...and..."that the perusal of excellent books is, as it were, to interview with the noblest men of past ages
René Descartes
Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.
Stendhal
[J]ust the sight of this book, even though it was of no authority, made me wonder how it happened that so many different men – and learned men among them – have been and are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many wicked insults about women and their behaviour. Not only one or two ... but, more generally, from the treatises of all philosophers and poets and from all the orators – it would take too long to mention their names – it seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth. Thinking deeply about these matters, I began to examine my character and conduct as a natural woman and, similarly, I considered other women whose company I frequently kept, princesses, great ladies, women of the middle and lower classes, who had graciously told me of their most private and intimate thoughts, hoping that I could judge impartially and in good conscience whether the testimony of so many notable men could be true. To the best of my knowledge, no matter how long I confronted or dissected the problem, I could not see or realise how their claims could be true when compared to the natural behaviour and character of women.
Christine de Pizan
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
Victor Hugo
When you buy a jacket, it’s important the pockets are big enough for a paperback!
Daniel Pennac
What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbors, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
Voltaire
A book is no mere book anymore than man can be mere man. A book was like an individual man, unmatched and with no cause of existence beyond himself.
Marcel Proust
Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that's exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours digging a tunnel to enter the strongroom of a bank. He emerges face to face with hundreds of strongboxes, all identical, and opens them one by one. And each time a box is opened, it loses its anonymity and becomes unique: one is filled with paintings, another with a bundle of banknotes, a third with jewels or letters tied in ribbon, engravings, objects of no value at all, silverware, photos, gold sovereigns, dried flowers, files of paper, crystal glasses, or children’s toys--and so on. There is something intoxicating about opening a new one, finding its contents and feeling overjoyed that in a trice one is no longer in front of a set of boxes, but in the presence of the riches and wretched banalities that make up human existence.
Jacques Bonnet
No privacy left. No manners.
Anaïs Nin
I loved your breaking down that door, repeated Djuna. Through Rango she had breathed some other realm she had never attained before. She had touched through his act some climate of violence she had never known before.
Anaïs Nin
Out of worship and out of love he would let no one light the stove for her either, as if he would be the warmth and the fire to dry and warm her feet.
Anaïs Nin
Although I was so big, and so rough in many ways, loved hunting, fighting, horseback riding, I loved the piano above everything else...The mountain man's obsession is to get a glimpse of the sea.
Anaïs Nin
He failed to see that it contained at once all of Djuna's wishes which had been denied, and these wishes had flown from all directions to meet at this intersection and to plead once more for understanding.
Anaïs Nin
Of course, you'll defend Jay," says Rango, He was a part of your former life, of your former values. I will never be able to alter that. I want you to think as I do.""But Rango, you couldn't respect someone who surrendered an opinion merely to please you . It would be hypocrisy.
Anaïs Nin
What can I say Rango? What can I do to prove to you that I belong to you?
Anaïs Nin
He had appointed her not only guardian angel, but a member of his ideals.
Anaïs Nin
Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it, to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: "I don't understand
Anaïs Nin
The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment.
Anaïs Nin
Her presence had awakened in him a man suddenly whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in action.
Anaïs Nin
They had reached a perfect moment of human love. They had created a moment of perfect understanding and accord. This highest moment would now remain as point of comparison to torment them later on when all natural imperfections would disintegrate it.
Anaïs Nin
These rituals Rango could not sustain, for he could not maintain the effort to arrive on time since his lifelong habit had created the opposite habit: to elude, to avoid, to disappoint every expectation of others, every commitment, every promise, every crystallization.
Anaïs Nin
Paul, Paul, this is the claim you never made, the fervor you never showed. You were so cool and light, so elusive, and I never felt you encircling me and claiming possession. Rango is saying all the words I wanted to hear you say. You never came close to me, even while taking me. You took me as men take foreign women in distant countries whose language they cannot speak. You took me in silence and strangeness.
Anaïs Nin
Ali Baba protects the lovers! Gives them the luck of bandits, and no guilt, for love fills certain people and expands them beyond all laws; there is no time, no place for regrets, hesitations, cowardices. Love runs free and reckless, and all the gentle trickeries perpetrated to protect others from its burns-those who are not the lovers but who might be the victims of this love's expansion.
Anaïs Nin
Now, his hair is white and he no longer understands anyone's need to love, for he has lost everything, not to love, but to his games of love; and when you love as a game, you lose everything, as he lost his home and wife, and now he clings to me, afraid of loss, afraid of solitude.
Anaïs Nin
I am sure you would not understand if I told you my father is delightfully clear and selfish, tender and lying, formal and incurable. He exhausts all the loves given to him. If I did not leave his house at night to warm myself in Rango's burning hands I would die at my task, arid and barren, sapless, while my father monologues about his past, and I yawn yawn yawn...
Anaïs Nin
No moment of charm without long roots in the past, no moment of charm is born on bare soil, a careless accident of beauty, but is the sum of great sorrows, growths, and efforts.
Anaïs Nin
But love, the great narcotic, was the hothouse in which all the selves burst into their fullest bloom...
Anaïs Nin
Men from the mountains always dream of the sea, and above all things I love to travel.
Anaïs Nin
Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.
Roland Barthes
Real lives have no end. Real books have no end.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.
Marcel Proust