Quotes by French Authors - Page 152

Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected.
Roman Payne
In love, one and one are one.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).
Milan Kundera
It’s probably not just by chance that I’m alone. It would be very hard for a man to live with me, unless he’s terribly strong. And if he’s stronger than I, I’m the one who can’t live with him. … I’m neither smart nor stupid, but I don’t think I’m a run-of-the-mill person. I’ve been in business without being a businesswoman, I’ve loved without being a woman made only for love. The two men I’ve loved, I think, will remember me, on earth or in heaven, because men always remember a woman who caused them concern and uneasiness. I’ve done my best, in regard to people and to life, without precepts, but with a taste for justice.
Coco Chanel
When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.
Victor Hugo
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
Anaïs Nin
Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
Anaïs Nin
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
Anaïs Nin
Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving.
Anaïs Nin
Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.
Anaïs Nin
What I cannot love, I overlook.
Anaïs Nin
Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.
Anaïs Nin
When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness.
Anaïs Nin
I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.
Anaïs Nin
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
André Gide
The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.
André Gide
I do not love men: I love what devours them.
André Gide
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
André Gide
You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore
André Gide
Yet I'm sure there's something more to be read in a man. People dare not -- they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry -- I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don't find themselves at all. I hate this moral agoraphobia -- it's the worst kind of cowardice. You can't create something without being alone. But who's trying to create here? What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that's just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life.
André Gide
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
André Gide
The color of truth is grey.
André Gide
God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.
André Gide
What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.
André Gide
Those who have eyes…do not know their happiness.
André Gide
But I think there comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass, and that the effort to revive such happiness depletes it; that nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.
André Gide
There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.
Coco Chanel
Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.
Milan Kundera
And he knew, also, what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed, and he, Rieux, thought it too: that a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.
Albert Camus
Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
Milan Kundera
Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead. --I shall feel it."She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:--"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you.
Victor Hugo
Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul...
Marguerite Yourcenar
You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.
Milan Kundera
Woman is sacred the woman one loves is holy.
Alexandre Dumas
I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.
Victor Hugo
My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.
André Breton
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
Marcel Proust
What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul
Victor Hugo
Nothing in life is worth,turning your back on,if you love it.
Albert Camus
Come sleep with me: We won't make Love, Love will make us.
Julio Cortázar