Quotes by French Authors - Page 150

Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.
Albert Camus
Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.
Arthur Rimbaud
A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
Emil M. Cioran
Bring something incomprehensible into the world!
Gilles Deleuze
That is the hardest thing of all. It is much harder to judge yourself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself, it's because you're truly a wise man.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.
Anaïs Nin
Those born to wealth, and who have the means of gratifying every wish, know not what is the real happiness of life, just as those who have been tossed on the stormy waters of the ocean on a few frail planks can alone realize the blessings of fair weather.
Alexandre Dumas
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.
Albert Camus
Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?
Charles Baudelaire
Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.
Michel Houellebecq
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
Emil M. Cioran
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
Emil M. Cioran
Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.
André Breton
The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.
Michel Houellebecq
What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.
Charles Baudelaire
Creo que todos tenemos un poco de esa bella locura que nos mantiene andando cuando todo alrededor es tan insanamente cuerdo.
Julio Cortázar
Dreams are necessary to life.
Anaïs Nin
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
Albert Camus
I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits
Anaïs Nin
It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, but it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: music, laughter,the physics of falling leaves, automobiles, holding hands,the scent of rain, the concept of subway trains... if only one could leave this life slowly!
Roman Payne
You are -- your life, and nothing else.
Jean-Paul Sartre
My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.
Marcel Proust
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
Gustave Flaubert
What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
Albert Camus
When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.
Alexandre Dumas
The beautiful is always bizarre.
Charles Baudelaire
Moral wounds have this peculiarity - they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.
Alexandre Dumas
No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.
Michel Legrand
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.
Marc Riboud
I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.
Albert Camus
My life didn't please me, so I created my life.
Coco Chanel
Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.
Albert Camus
Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
Jean Racine
Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance.
Coco Chanel
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.
Jean-Paul Sartre
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
Gustave Flaubert
Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.
Guillaume Apollinaire
I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
Simone de Beauvoir
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
Simone de Beauvoir
Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
Marie Curie
Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
Anaïs Nin
There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.
Albert Schweitzer
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
Anaïs Nin
No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Anaïs Nin
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
Émile Zola
Live to the point of tears.
Albert Camus
I go to seek a Great Perhaps.
François Rabelais
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
Nicolas Chamfort
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus
Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.
Albert Schweitzer
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
Gustave Flaubert
My wife with the hair of a wood fireWith the thoughts of heat lightningWith the waist of an hourglassWith the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tigerMy wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitudeWith the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earthWith the tongue of rubbed amber and glassMy wife with the tongue of a stabbed hostWith the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyesWith the tongue of an unbelievable stoneMy wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writingWith brows of the edge of a swallow's nestMy wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roofAnd of steam on the panesMy wife with shoulders of champagneAnd of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the iceMy wife with wrists of matchesMy wife with fingers of luck and ace of heartsWith fingers of mown hayMy wife with armpits of marten and of beechnutAnd of Midsummer NightOf privet and of an angelfish nestWith arms of seafoam and of riverlocksAnd of a mingling of the wheat and the millMy wife with legs of flaresWith the movements of clockwork and despairMy wife with calves of eldertree pithMy wife with feet of initialsWith feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinkingMy wife with a neck of unpearled barleyMy wife with a throat of the valley of goldOf a tryst in the very bed of the torrentWith breasts of nightMy wife with breasts of a marine molehillMy wife with breasts of the ruby's crucibleWith breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dewMy wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of daysWith the belly of a gigantic clawMy wife with the back of a bird fleeing verticallyWith a back of quicksilverWith a back of lightWith a nape of rolled stone and wet chalkAnd of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinkingMy wife with hips of a skiffWith hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathersAnd of shafts of white peacock plumesOf an insensible pendulumMy wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestosMy wife with buttocks of swans' backsMy wife with buttocks of springWith the sex of an irisMy wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypusMy wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeatMy wife with a sex of mirrorMy wife with eyes full of tearsWith eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needleMy wife with savanna eyesMy wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prisonMy wife with eyes of wood always under the axeMy wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire
André Breton
It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' - not even the most important - because my life no longer belongs to me because...you are always me.
Jean-Paul Sartre
If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us
Stendhal
It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!
Roman Payne
To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...?
Roland Barthes
Love is the most selfish of all the passions.
Alexandre Dumas