Quotes by French Authors - Page 13

Every flower is a soul blossoming in Nature.
Gérard de Nerval
All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.
Joseph Joubert
Men argue nature acts.
Voltaire
Music is given to us specifically to make order of things to move from an anarchic individualistic state to a regulated perfectly concious one which alone insures vitality and durability.
Igor Stravinsky
Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The function of pop music is to be consumed.
Pierre Boulez
I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
Igor Stravinsky
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky
Music is the art of thinking with sounds.
Jules Combarieu
Nothing is better than music.... It has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.
Nadia Boulanger
Music is another planet.
Alphonse Daudet
He was dying all his life.
Hector Berlioz
It is the best of all trades to make songs and the second best to sing them.
Hilaire Belloc
Great men undertake great things because they are great fools because they think them easy.
Vauvenargues
Fear desire hope still push us on toward the future.
Michel de Montaigne
The public doesn't want new music the main thing that it demands of a composer is that he be dead.
Arthur Honegger
If each of us were to confess his most secret desire the one that inspires all his plans all his actions he would say: "I want to be praised."
E. M. Cioran
All men have happiness as their object: there is no exception. However different the means they employ they aim at the same end.
Blaise Pascal
It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.
André Gide
She lacks confidence she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.
Anaïs Nin
We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.
André Gide
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be one's own self
Michel de Montaigne
I was and I always shall be hampered by what I think other people will say.
Violette Leduc
Do not wish to be anything but what you are.
Saint Francis de Sales
Nothing is good for everyone but only relatively to some people.
André Gide
Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity the necessity of being the man you are and not another. You are free to be that man but not free to be another.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.
Simone Weil
Everyone has a right to his own course of action.
Molière
I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself because it always changes me.
Anaïs Nin
At last I perceive that in revolutions the supreme power finally rests with the most abandoned.
Georges Jacques Danton
There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Napoleon
I survived. (J'ai vecu.)
Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes
The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.
Simone de Beauvoir
Republics are brought to their ends by luxury monarchies by poverty.
Charles Montesquieu
Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.
Albert Camus
Man is a venerating animal. He venerates as easily as he purges himself. When they take away from him the gods of his fathers he looks for others abroad.
Max Jacob
Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. It is not enough that a thing be possible for it to be believed.
Voltaire
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
Marcel Proust
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
Albert Camus
I respect only those who resist me but cannot tolerate them.
Charles de Gaulle
One must never lose time in vainly regretting the past or in complaining against the changes which cause us discomfort for change is the essence of life.
Anatole France
The profits of good luck are perishable if you build on fortune you build on sand the more advancement you achieve the more dangers you run.
Marquis de Racan
To make a crooked stick straight we bend it the contrary way.
Michel Montaigne
What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities of having a patient but restless mind of sacrificing one's ease or vanity of uniting a love of detail to foresight and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully.
Charles Victor Cherbuliez
It is one thing to be gifted and quite another thing to be worthy of one's own gift.
Nadia Boulanger
Many are destined to reason wrongly others not to reason at all: and others to persecute those who do reason.
Voltaire
The last advance of reason is to recognize that it is surpassed by innumerable things it is feeble if it cannot realize that.
Blaise Pascal
All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.
Blaise Pascal
The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fist fight put your mind on the strategy of the fight and you will not feel the other fellow's punches.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I like reality. It tastes of bread.
Jean Anouilh
If one considered life as a simple loan one would perhaps be less exacting.
Eugène Delacroix
We never enjoy perfect happiness our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction.
Pierre Corneille
All our interior world is reality - and that perhaps more so than our apparent world.
Marc Chagall
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The chief pang of most trials is not so much the actual suffering itself as our own spirit of resistance to it.
Jean Nicholas Grou
We must like what we have when we don't have what we like.
Roger de Rabutin
A hero is a man who does what he can.
Romain Rolland
Better is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness.
Bernard de Fontenelle