Quotes by French Authors - Page 149

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Life's great happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
Victor Hugo
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.
Henri Bergson
If a man is to shed the light of the sun upon other men, he must first of all have it within himself.
Romain Rolland
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
I remembered the fox. One runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.
Albert Schweitzer
I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
Anaïs Nin
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
Anaïs Nin
The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.
Voltaire
We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.
Anaïs Nin
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
Anaïs Nin
I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.
Michel de Montaigne
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Victor Hugo
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Those who do not weep, do not see.
Victor Hugo
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
Michel de Montaigne
I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
Anaïs Nin
There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work.
Anaïs Nin
People where you live," the little prince said, "grow five thousand roses in one garden... yet they don't find what they're looking for...They don't find it," I answered.And yet what they're looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water..."Of course," I answered.And the little prince added, "But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
Anaïs Nin
Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
Anaïs Nin
Not being heard is no reason for silence.
Victor Hugo
Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.
Victor Hugo
A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.
Gilles Deleuze
Courage isn't having the strength to go on - it is going on when you don't have strength.
Napoléon Bonaparte
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
Anaïs Nin
Trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.
Molière
The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
What makes the desert beautiful,' said the little prince, 'is that somewhere it hides a well...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.
Voltaire
There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. " Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.
Alexandre Dumas
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.
Simone Weil
We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
Julio Cortázar
The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.
Victor Hugo
Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate--for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.
Albert Camus
I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. Italways made me want to do just the opposite.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
Milan Kundera
...because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.
Milan Kundera
But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.
Gustave Flaubert
You will have five hundred million little bells, and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
If we do not find anything very pleasant, at least we shall find something new.
Voltaire
A human being - what is a human being? Everything and nothing. Through the power of thought it can mirror everything it experiences. Through memory and knowledge it becomes a microcosm, carrying the world within itself. A mirror of things, a mirror of facts. Each human being becomes a little universe within the universe!
Guy de Maupassant
In life, more than in anything else, it isn’t easy to end up alive.
Roman Payne
We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.
Gustave Flaubert
Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up and quick going down.
Guy de Maupassant
Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her; but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.
Voltaire
Let us work without reasoning,' said Martin; 'it is the only way to make life endurable.
Voltaire
I do not cling to life sufficiently to fear death.
Alexandre Dumas
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.
Michel Houellebecq
Life has no meaning, the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things...as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: "It shines like a little diamond","What does?""This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.
Jean-Paul Sartre
All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.
Marcel Duchamp
An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me...
Michel Houellebecq
For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.” But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art.
Jean-Paul Sartre
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura oflife which bears no relation to true immortality but through which theycontinue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. Itis as though they were traveling abroad.
Marcel Proust