Quotes by French Authors - Page 151

You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire. interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).
Roland Barthes
I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.
Anaïs Nin
If people did not love one another, I really don't see what use there would be in having any spring.
Victor Hugo
She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her... I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Love is the only future God offers.
Victor Hugo
Know that it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!...Look, I am not laughing now, crying, crying for you, Christine, who have torn off my mask and who therefore can never leave me again!...Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me!
Gaston Leroux
The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
Michel Foucault
And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.
Anaïs Nin
Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
Milan Kundera
There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.
George Sand
What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.
Albert Camus
Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248)
Simone de Beauvoir
She blushed and so did he. She greeted him in a faltering voice, and he spoke to her without knowing what he was saying.
Voltaire
Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.
Roman Payne
True love always makes a man better, no matter what woman inspires it.
Alexandre Dumas
I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.
Anaïs Nin
Please-tame me!' he said.'I want to, very much,' the little prince replied. 'But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.''One only understands the things that one tames,' said the fox. 'Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me.''What must I do, to tame you?' asked the little prince.'You must be very patient,' replied the fox. 'First you will sit down at a little distance from me-like that-in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Waiting is erotic
Irène Némirovsky
Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
Milan Kundera
I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love.
Françoise Sagan
Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.
Marcel Proust
I am beginning to understand," said the little prince. "There is a flower... I think that she has tamed me...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
Albert Camus
There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy.
Jean Anouilh
You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.
Marguerite Duras
Marius and Cosette were in the dark in regard to each other. They did not speak, they did not bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and, like the stars in the sky separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other.
Victor Hugo
Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
Milan Kundera
For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble to produce thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers? It's no more serious and more important than the numbers that fat red gentleman is adding up? Suppose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my planet, one that a little sheep can wipe out in a single bite one morning, just like that, without even realizing what he'd doing - that isn't important? If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself 'My flower's up there somewhere...' But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important?
Antoine De Saint Exupery
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
Michel de Montaigne
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
Milan Kundera
It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
Gustave Flaubert
Love lasts about seven years. That's how long it takes for the cells of the body to totally replace themselves.
Françoise Sagan
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion
Simone de Beauvoir
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
When someone blushes, doesn't that mean 'yes'?
Antoine De Saint Exupery
You know that when I hate you, it is because I love you to a point of passion that unhinges my soul.
Julie de Lespinasse
Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it inflames the great.
Roger de Rabutin de Bussy
Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.
Simone de Beauvoir
Love consists of not looking each other in the eye, but of looking outwardly in the same direction.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
True love begins when nothing is looked for in return.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
You're beautiful, but you're empty...One couldn't die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass, since she's the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three butterflies). Since she's the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.
Colette
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.
François de La Rochefoucauld
The more one judges, the less one loves.
Honoré de Balzac
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
What is love? two souls and one flesh friendship? two bodies and one soul.
Joseph Roux
You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.
Victor Hugo
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Victor Hugo
Love...no such thing.Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist. Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.
Arthur Rimbaud
The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.
Victor Hugo
He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Milan Kundera
Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.
Anatole France
The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.
Blaise Pascal
I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.
Milan Kundera
Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
Milan Kundera