Quotes by French Authors - Page 129

He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
Albert Camus
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its stud
Hector Berlioz
An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
Gustave Flaubert
The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
Milan Kundera
From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent. It can only be squandered.
Roman Payne
Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy ready-made things in the shops. But since there are no shops where you can buy friends, men no longer have any friends.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Time spent with a cat is never wasted.
Colette
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Jean Genet
Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.
Jean de La Bruyère
The material world coexists alongside the ideal life, and the purest intentions are bound to the earth by ridiculous threads, but they are threads of iron and they are not easily broken.
Alexandre Dumas fils
To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further, There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.
Victor Hugo
Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.
Marcel Proust
An attentive reader will always learn more, and more quickly, from good authors than from life.
Hervé Le Tellier
Inside me there was everything I had believed was outside. There was, in particular, the sun, light, and all colors. There were even the shapes of objects and the distance between objects. Everything was there and movement as well… Light is an element that we carry inside us and which can grow there with as much abundance, variety, and intensity as it can outside of us…I could light myself…that is, I could create a light inside of me so alive, so large, and so near that my eyes, my physical eyes, or what remained of them, vibrated, almost to the point of hurting… God is there under a form that has the good luck to be neither religious, not intellectual, nor sentimental, but quite simply alive.
Jacques Lusseyran
At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls,you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone.
Jean-Paul Sartre
But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.
Marcel Proust
Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.
Milan Kundera
I was taught that the way of progress is neither swift nor easy.
Marie Curie
She had accepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness. He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
Albert Camus
If I were to share Jaques' existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious.
Simone de Beauvoir
Jaques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, everything I did not possess. It was to him I owed pains and pleasures whose violence alone saved me from the deserts of boredom in which I found myself bogged down.
Simone de Beauvoir
To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.
Simone Weil
Love is not honourable, unless it is based on equality.
Marie de France
Pablo's many stories and reminiscences about Olga and Marie-Thérese and Dora Maar, as well as their continuing presence just offstage in our own life together, gradually made me realize that he had a kind of Bluebeard complex that made him want to cut off the heads of all women he had collected in his private museum. But he didn't cut the heads entirely off. He preferred to have life go on and to have all those women who had shared his life at one moment or another still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls, just to prove there was some life left in them, that it hung by a thread, and that he held the other end of the thread. From time to time they would provide a humorous or dramatic or sometimes tragic side to things, and that was all grist to his mill.
Françoise Gilot
The greater part of a men who speak ill of women are speaking of a certain woman.
Rémy de Gourmont
The engineer’s ready capitulation, however, did not hide from the poet’s mother the sad realization that the adventure into which she had plunged so impulsively--and which had seemed so intoxicatingly beautiful--had no turned out to be the great, mutually fulfilling love she was convinced she had a full right to expect. Her father was the owner of two prosperous Prague pharmacies, and her morality was based on strict give-and-take. For her part, she had invested everything in love (she had even been willing to sacrifice her parents and their peaceful existence); in turn, she had expected her partner to invest an equal amount of capital of feelings in the common account. To redress the imbalance, she gradually withdrew her emotional deposit and after the wedding presented a proud, severe face to her husband.
Milan Kundera
He told me that from now on, everything I did and everything he did was of the utmost importance: any word spoken, the slightest gesture, would take on a meaning, and everything that happened between us would change us continually. 'For that reason,'he said,'I wish I were able to suspend time at this moment and keep things exactly at this point, because I feel this instant is a true beginning. We have a definite but unknown quantity of experience at our disposal. As soon as the hourglass is turned, the sand will begin to run out and once it starts, it cannot stop until it's all gone. That's why I wish I could hold it back at the start. We should make a minimum of gestures, pronounce a minimum of words, even see each other as seldom as possible, if that would prolong things. We don't know how much of everything we have ahead of us so we have to take the greatest precautions not to destroy the beauty of what we have. Everything exists in limited quantity-especially happiness. If a love is to come into being, it is all written down somewhere, and also its duration and content. If you could arrive at the complete intensity the first day, it would be ended the first day. And so if it's something you want so much that you'd like to have it prolonged in time, you must be extremely careful not to make the slightest excessive demand that might prevent it from developing to the greatest extent over the longest period...If the wings of the butterfly are to keep their sheen, you mustn't touch them. We mustn't abuse something which is to bring light into both our lives. Everything else in my life only weighs me down and shuts out the light. This thing wih you seems like a window that is opening up. I want it to remain open...
Françoise Gilot
The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher possession of their own being.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.
Francine du Plessix Gray
So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.
Milan Kundera
She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.
Milan Kundera
You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.
Gilles Deleuze
the important people in our lives leave imprints. they may die or go in the physical realm, but they are always there in your heart, because they helped form your heart
Jules Renard
Proclaim your pride and bitterness loudly to the world, but to me speak softly, and tell me simply that she doesn't love you.
Edmond Rostand
It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it's that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.
Michel Houellebecq
Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.
Gustave Flaubert
Why, you are a man of heart!""Sometimes," replied Phileas Fogg, quietly. "When I have the time.
Jules Verne
In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs
François Truffaut
The girl was grateful to the young man for every bit of flattery; she wanted to linger for a moment in its warmth and so she said, 'You're very good at lying.''Do I look like a liar?''You look like you enjoy lying to women,' said the girl, and into her words there crept unawares a touch of the old anxiety, because she really did believe that her young man enjoyed lying to women.
Milan Kundera
[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.
Michel de Montaigne
He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.
André Gide
Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.
André Breton
I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.
Albert Camus
It is better to enlighten men’s minds than to teach them to be obstinate in their prejudices.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.
Anatole France
Indeed, men who have either quaffed or even tasted the liberal arts penetrate with their aid far more deeply into the secrets of the divine wisdom." - John Calvin
John Calvin
Doctors of ancient times used to recommend reading to their patients as a physical exercise on an equal level as walking, running, or ball-playing.
Jean Leclercq
In the Middle Ages, as in antiquity, they read usually, not as today, principally with the eyes, but with the lips, pronouncing what they saw, and with the ears, listening to the words pronounced. hearing what is called the "voices of the pages." It is a real acoustical reading.
Jean Leclercq
Always choose the most difficult way, there you will not meet competitors.
Charles de Gaulle
I do not consider my deeds or my knowledge to be a great thing. The only fact is — and I can say this honestly — that I love learning and a solitary life.
Christine de Pizan
We do many things carelessly or unwillingly, but nothing studiously unless we are willing and apply ourselves.
Peter Abelard
For my part, the more I went forward in the study of letters, and ever more easily, the greater became the ardour of my devotion to them, until in truth I was so enthralled by my passion for learning that, gladly leaving to my brothers the pomp of glory in arms, the right of heritage and all the honours that should have been mine as the eldest born, I fled utterly from the court of Mars that I might win learning in the bosom of Minerva. And -- since I found the armory of logical reasoning more to my liking than the other forms of philosophy, I exchanged all other weapons for these, and to the prizes of victory in war I preferred the battle of minds in disputation.
Pierre Abélard
Equality, citizens, is not the whole of society on a level, a society of tall blades of grass and small oaks, or a number of entangled jealousies. It is, legally speaking, every aptitude having the same opportunity for a career; politically all consciences having the same right. Equality has an organ, gratuitous and compulsory education. We must begin with the right to the alphabet.
Victor Hugo
Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.
Jacques Barzun
Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material improvement. Knowledge is a viaticum. Though is a prime necessity; truth is nourishment, like wheat. A reasoning faculty, deprived of knowledge and wisdom, pines away. We should feel the same pity for minds that do not eat as for stomachs. If there be anything sadder than a body perishing for want of bread, it is a mind dying of hunger for lack of light. All progress tends toward the solution. Some day, people will be amazed. As the human race ascends, the deepest layers will naturally emerge from the zone of distress. The effacement of wretchedness will be effected by a simple elevation level.
Victor Hugo
Morality in the general is well enough known by men, but the particular refinements of virtue are unknown by most persons; thus the majority of parents, without knowing it and without intending it, give very bad examples to their children.
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot
Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.
Michel Foucault
I follow the course marked out by my principles and, what is more, enjoy a deep and noble pleasure in following it. You deeply despise the human race, at least our part of it; you think it not only fallen but incapable of ever rising again... For my part, as I feel neither the right nor the wish to entertain such opinions of my species and my country, I think it is not necessary to despair of them. In my opinion, human societies, like individuals, amount to something only in liberty...And God forbid that my mind should ever be crossed by the thought that it is necessary to despair of success... You will allow me to have less confidence in your teaching than in the goodness and justice of God.
Alexis de Tocqueville