Quotes by French Authors - Page 144

The dreams we imagine when we are asleep should not in any way make us doubt the truth of the thoughts we have when we are awake.
René Descartes
Nature alone can lead to the understanding of art, just as art brings us back to nature with greater awarness. It is the source of all beauty, since it is the source of all life.
Eugène Carrière
The relationship between truth and reason:"Truth cannot be reached by reason alone!
Maurice Blondel
Whether Hindus or Greeks, Egyptians or Japanese, Chinese, Sumerians, or ancient Americans -- or even Romans, the most "modern" among people of antiquity -- they all placed the Golden Age, the Age of Truth, the rule of Kronos or of Ra or of any other gods on earth -- the glorious beginning of the slow, downward unfurling of history, whatever name it be given -- far behind them in the past.
Savitri Devi
I worship impersonal Nature, which is neither "good" or "bad", and who knows neither love nor hatred. I worship Life; the Sun, Sustainer of life. I believe in the Law of everlasting struggle, which is the law of life, and in the duty of the best specimens of our race — the natural élite of mankind — to rule the earth, and evolve out of themselves a caste of supermen, a people 'like unto the Gods'.
Savitri Devi
With the beginning of life, comes the thirst for truth, whereas the ability to lie is gradually acquired in the process of trying to stay alive.
Gao Xingjian
He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God's providence to lead him aright
Blaise Pascal
Art-making is not about telling the truth but making the truth felt
Christian Boltanski
Some, often without knowing it, suffered from being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch with them through the usual channels of friendship, letters, trains, and boats. Others, fewer these, Tarrou may have been one of them, had desired reunion with something they couldn't have defined, but which seemed to them the only desirable thing on earth. For want of a better name, they sometimes called it peace.
Albert Camus
Toutes les opinions ne se valent pas, et il ne faut pas confondre l'éloquence d'une parole avec la justesse d'une pensée.
Tzvetan Todorov
The mind is satisfied with phrased, but not the body, the body is more fastidious, it wants muscles. A body always tells the truth, that's why it's usually depressing and disgusting to look at.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
Eugène Ionesco
BERENGER: And you consider all this natural? 

DUDARD: What could be more natural than a rhinoceros? 

BERENGER: Yes, but for a man to turn into a rhinoceros is abnormal beyond question. 

DUDARD: Well, of course, that's a matter of opinion ... 

BERENGER: It is beyond question, absolutely beyond question! 
DUDARD: You seem very sure of yourself. Who can say where the normal stops and the abnormal begins? Can you personally define these conceptions of normality and abnormality? Nobody has solved this problem yet, either medically or philosophically. You ought to know that. 

BERENGER: The problem may not be resolved philosophically -- but in practice it's simple. They may prove there's no such thing as movement ... and then you start walking ... [he starts walking up and down the room] ... and you go on walking, and you say to yourself, like Galileo, 'E pur si muove' ... 

DUDARD: You're getting things all mixed up! Don't confuse the issue. In Galileo's case it was the opposite: theoretic and scientific thought proving itself superior to mass opinion and dogmatism. 

BERENGER: [quite lost] What does all that mean? Mass opinion, dogmatism -- they're just words! I may be mixing everything up in my head but you're losing yours. You don't know what's normal and what isn't any more. I couldn't care less about Galileo ... I don't give a damn about Galileo. 

DUDARD: You brought him up in the first place and raised the whole question, saying that practice always had the last word. Maybe it does, but only when it proceeds from theory! The history of thought and science proves that. BERENGER: [more and more furious] It doesn't prove anything of the sort! It's all gibberish, utter lunacy! 

DUDARD: There again we need to define exactly what we mean by lunacy ... 

BERENGER: Lunacy is lunacy and that's all there is to it! Everybody knows what lunacy is. And what about the rhinoceroses -- are they practice or are they theory?
Eugène Ionesco
We are more severe judges of our own acts... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.
Anaïs Nin
One swallows the lie that flatters, but sips the bitter truth drop by drop.
Denis Diderot
Once again, we are reminded that awakening, or enlightenment is not the property of Buddhism, any more than Truth is the property of Christianity. Neither the Buddha nor the Christ belongs exclusively to the communities that were founded in their names. They belong to all people of goodwill, all who are attentive to the secret which lives in the depths of their breath and their consciousness. (14)
Jean-Yves Leloup
There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.
Victor Hugo
Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true, and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels.
Albert Camus
What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
Milan Kundera
Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué."[Letter to Armand Barbès, 12 May 1867]
George Sand
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.One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other person—which means, moreover, to have non-read the same books. From the beginning of the relationship, then, it is crucial to show that we can match the expectations of our beloved by making him or her sense the proximity of our inner libraries.
Pierre Bayard
The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.
Pierre Abélard
Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images, the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire: that is MUHAMMAD. As regards all the standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask IS THERE ANY MAN GREATER THAN HE?
Alphonse de Lamartine
Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.
Jean Rostand
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
Rémy de Gourmont
There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.
Albert Schweitzer
I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!
Roman Payne
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
Honoré de Balzac
And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Scepticism is the first step towards truth.
Denis Diderot
It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.
Anatole France
There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.
Voltaire
There is nothing more ancient than the truth.
René Descartes
We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.
Marcel Proust
A woman with good shoes i never ugly!
Coco Chanel
Humility is nothing but truth, and pride is nothing but lying.
St. Vincent de Paul
I can be forced to live without happiness, but I will never consent to live without honor.
Pierre Corneille
There is no compulsion for man to accept the truth. But it is certainly a shame upon the human intellect when man is not even interested in finding out as to what is the truth! Islam teaches that God has given man the faculty of reason and therefore expects man to reason things out objectively and systematically for himself. To reflect and to question and to reflect.
Maurice Bucaille
Why do people respect the package rather than the man?
Michel de Montaigne
A woman has to be intelligent, have charm, a sense of humor, and be kind. It's the same qualities I require from a man.
Catherine Deneuve
We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it’s very healthy, because it’s the only place where we never lie. At night we don’t lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life.
Hélène Cixous
You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.
René Descartes
Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.
Jules Verne
It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the truth.
Blaise Pascal
We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.
Simone Weil
It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.
René Descartes
Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.
Romain Rolland
the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth
Jean-Paul Sartre
Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.
Albert Schweitzer
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Anaïs Nin
Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
Blaise Pascal
Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
And thus, the actions of life often not allowing any delay, it is a truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine the most true opinions we ought to follow the most probable.
René Descartes
For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.
Milan Kundera
It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.
Victor Hugo
Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
Albert Camus
What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
Jacques Derrida
What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.
Simone de Beauvoir
Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.
Jean-Paul Sartre