Quotes by French Authors - Page 138

I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
Milan Kundera
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.
Milan Kundera
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
Albert Camus
People living deeply have no fear of death.
Anaïs Nin
It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.
Victor Hugo
Mais, j’aurai beau supplier, j’aurai beau me révolter, il n’y aura plus rien pour moi ; je ne serai, désormais, ni heureux, ni malheureux. Je ne peux pas ressusciter. Je vieillirai aussi tranquille que je le suis aujourd’hui dans cette chambre où tant d’êtres ont laissé leur trace, où aucun être n’a laissé la sienne.Cette chambre, on la retrouve à chaque pas. C’est la chambre de tout le monde. On croit qu’elle est fermée, non : elle est ouverte aux quatre vents de l’espace. Elle est perdue au milieu des chambres semblables, comme de la lumière dans le ciel, comme un jour dans les jours, comme moi partout.Moi, moi ! Je ne vois plus maintenant que la pâleur de ma figure, aux orbites profondes, enterrée dans le soir, et ma bouche pleine d’un silence qui doucement, mais sûrement, m’étouffe et m’anéantit.Je me soulève sur mon coude comme sur un moignon d’aile. Je voudrais qu’il m’arrivât quelque chose d’infini !
Henri Barbusse
We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them.
Albert Camus
L'espoir est la chose la plus difficile à tuer dans le cœur d'une femme amoureuse.
Diane Ducret
While there is life, there is hope.
Jules Verne
There is so much sttuborn hope in a human heart.
Albert Camus
There is do much sttuborn hope in a human heart.
Albert Camus
All night the angelic made me gasp for breadth and dream of drowning in sand or earth or mud. I got up, my chest still racked, but glad to be finished with the phantasms which magnify a reality difficult enough in itself. Coffee so bitter it was undrinkable. A big roar. Two big roars. No relief. The mornings only consolation was of a faecal nature. Unexpectedly and impeccably i produced a magnificent turd, so long it had to curve at the ends to fit into the bowl. I contemplated fondly the fine chubby little babe of living clay i'd just brought forth, and my zest for life returned.
Michel Tournier
Le ciel était absolument noir, il n'y avait plus d'étoiles, mais évidemment il en voyait une.
Victor Hugo
But my faith seems naive, at least today. Maybe tomorrow I can believe again.
Anaïs Nin
La mise en place du processus de résilience externe doit être continue autour de l'enfant blessé. Son accueil après l'agression constitue la première maille nécessaire et pas forcément verbale, pour renouer le lien après la déchirure. La deuxième maille, plus tardive, exige que les familles et les institutions offrent à l'enfant des lieux pour y produire ses représentations du traumatisme. La troisième maille, sociale et culturelle, se met en place quand la société propose à ces enfants la possibilité de se socialiser. Il ne reste plus qu'à tricoter sa résilience pendant tout le reste de sa vie.
Boris Cyrulnik
For this reason, it is well said that misfortune is sometimes good for something, for it teaches at the same time that it hurts.
Christine de Pizan
From Les Miserables:All at once, in the midst of this profound calm, a fresh sound arose; a sound as celestial, divine, ineffable, ravishing, as the other had been horrible. It was a hymn which issued from the gloom, a dazzling burst of prayer and harmony in the obscure and alarming silence of the night; women's voices, but voices composed at one and the same time of the pure accents of virgins and the innocent accent of children, -- voices which are not of the earth, and which resemble those that the newborn infant still hears, and which the dying man hears already. This song proceeded from the gloomy edifice which towered above the garden. At the moment when the hubbub of demons retreated, one would have said that a choir of angels was approaching through the gloom.Cosette and Jean Valjean fell on their knees.They knew not what it was, they knew not where they were; but both of them, the man and the child, the penitent and the innocent, felt that they must kneel.These voices had this strange characteristic, that they did not prevent the building from seeming to be deserted. It was a supernatural chant in an uninhabited house. While these voices were singing, Jean Valjean thought of nothing. He no longer beheld the night; he beheld a blue sky. It seemed to him that he felt those wings which we all have within us, unfolding.The song died away. It may have lasted a long time. Jean Valjean could not have told. Hours of ecstasy are never more than a moment.
Victor Hugo
No point carrying useless ballast. It won't change a thing.
Joanne Harris
A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love
Stendhal
The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.
Henri Bergson
Do we ever have to abandon all hope? Is it not perhaps a good thing that by refusing to give in to the evidence, the dreams that lie half awake in us all may persist?
Théodore Monod
We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.
Marcel Proust
Are we alone? Over time, you will come up with various answers to that same nagging question. Eventually one day it will occur to you that this endless asking is the answer you have been looking for. The fact that we have an ongoing dialogue with the universe is proof enough that there is "something" out there.
Veronique Vienne
[W]hen someone finds himself quite unjustly attacked and hated on all sides, there is no need for such a person to feel dismayed by misfortune. See how Fortune, who has harmed many a one, is so inconstant, for God, Who opposes all wrong deeds, raises up those in whom hope dwells.
Christine de Pizan
With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair.
Roman Payne
Life must go on, even if it's no joke...just pretend to believe in the future.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
[A] person whose head is bowed and whose eyes are heavy cannot look at the light.
Christine de Pizan
Joy is but the sign that creative emotion is fulfilling its purpose.
Charles Du Bos
And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.
Albert Camus
Hope is the greatest madness. What can we expect of a world that we enter with the assurance of seeing our fathers and mothers die? A world where, if two beings love each other and give their lives to each other, both can be sure that one will watch the other perish?
Alfred de Vigny
We can be friends. We can be anything we want to be.
Muriel Barbery
At such moments the collapse of their courage, willpower, and endurance was so abrupt that they felt they could never drag themselves out of the pit of despond into which they had fallen. Therefore they forced themselves never to think about the problematic day of escape, to cease looking to the future, and always to keep, so to speak, their eyes fixed on the ground at their feet. But, naturally enough, this prudence, this habit of feinting with their predicament and refusing to put up a fight, was ill rewarded. For, while averting that revulsion which they found so unbearable, they also deprived themselves of those redeeming moments, frequent enough when all is told, when by conjuring up pictures of a reunion to be, they could forget about the plague. Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.
Albert Camus
Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.
Victor Hugo
In joined hands there is still some token of hope, in the clinched fist none.
Victor Hugo
The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live.
Victor Hugo
À l'aurore, armés d'une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes.
Arthur Rimbaud
A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
Albert Camus
Hope costs nothing.
Colette
You'll stop hurting when you stop hoping.
Guillaume Musso
We should ask God to increase our hope when it is small, awaken it when it is dormant, confirm it when it is wavering, strengthen it when it is weak, and raise it up when it is overthrown.
John Calvin
Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.
Albert Camus
We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.
François de La Rochefoucauld
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
Victor Hugo
At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.
Gustave Flaubert
Ma couce... mon incomparable! T'aimer? Mais je t'ai adorée toute ma vie et je ne cesserai jamais de t'aimer? Jamais! Tant qu'il me restera une pensée, un souffle, je t'aimerais...
Juliette Benzoni
Ma douce... mon incomparable! T'aimer? Mais je t'ai adorée toute ma vie et je ne cesserai jamais de t'aimer? Jamais! Tant qu'il me restera une pensée, un souffle, je t'aimerais...
Juliette Benzoni
… I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.
Albert Camus
... the idea that 'Life' contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.
Marcel Proust
The heart has its own reasons that reason can't understand.
Voltaire
Whatever may have been said of the satiety of pleasure and of the disgust which usually follows passion, any man who has anything of a heart and who is not wretchedly and hopelessly blasé feels his love increased by his happiness, and very often the best way to retain a lover ready to leave is to give one's self up to him without reserve.
Théophile Gautier
I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because 'romantic' doesn't mean 'sugary.' It's dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can't attain.
Catherine Breillat
There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand different versions.
François de La Rochefoucauld
There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.
Anaïs Nin
As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.
Gustave Flaubert
Certein bodies... become luminous when heated. Their luminosity disappears after some time, but the capacity of becoming luminous afresh through heat is restored to them by the action of a spark, and also by the action of radium.
Marie Curie
If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.
Honoré de Balzac
Présente je vous fuis; absente, je vous trouve;Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit
Jean Racine
Through their kisses and caresses they experienced a joy and wonder the equal of which has never been known or heard of. But I shall be silent...; for the rarest and most delectable pleasures are those which are hinted at, but never told.
Chrétien de Troyes
Your neck. I want to kiss it.
Edmond Rostand