Quotes by French Authors - Page 2

He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.Nothing is more sublime.
Victor Hugo
To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!
Victor Hugo
If you ask the great city, ‘Who is this person?,’ she will answer, ‘He is my child.
Victor Hugo
Study is the child of silence and mystery.
Henri Murger
I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness. Skylarks sing in the sunshine, the blue sky, the warm air, in the fresh morning light. The owl flies by night, a dark shadow passing through the darkness; he hoots his sinister, quivering hoot, as though he delights in the intoxicating black immensity of space.
Guy de Maupassant
There is a wide difference between having poison and being poisoned. All apothecaries have poisons ready for special uses, but they are not consequently poisoned, because the poison is only in their shop, not in themselves; and so you many possess riches without being poisoned by them, so long as they are in your house or purse only, and not in your heart. It is the Christian's privilege to be rich in material things , and poor in attachment to them.
St. Francis de Sales
If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind.
Émilie Du Châtelet
The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much. It makes nonsense to say that men have, on the one hand, rights, and on the other hand, obligations. Such words only express differences in point of view. The actual relationship between the two is as between object and subject. A man, considered in isolation, only has duties, amongst which are certain duties towards himself. A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.
Simone Weil
Reading is an act of resistance. Against what? Against all constraints.
Daniel Pennac
He was possessed now with that obsession for the cross in which so many lips have worn themselves away on crucifixes.
Émile Zola
Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps, old snuff-boxes, or even to paintings and statues.
Marcel Proust
No. She told me she was going to marry him, to get French nationality . . . She was obsessed with getting a nationality...
Patrick Modiano
I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.-Claude Frollo
Victor Hugo
When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from above?
Gustave Flaubert
The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable
Jacques Barzun
If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness. (Monseigneur Bienvenu in _Les Miserables_)
Victor Hugo
The torment of love can transform people into wretched monsters
Mathias Malzieu
I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.
Georges Bataille
Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?
Charles Baudelaire
You speak of the hand of Fatma, my friends, but you do not know the terrible power of this hand, the hand of monsters that menace you and seduce you with their subterranean access, their metallic splintering, their inhuman grotesqueness of idols.
Georges Limbour
Deciding what to read is also a matter of filtering.
Jean-Claude Carrière
Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Guy Billout
A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
Gustave Flaubert
She was dark-haired, fierce; she wore two drop earrings made of crystal; her face was a pure oval tickled with dimples; her skin was golden; and her laugh was like a fire in the night. But on her face you could also read the concentration of a soul whose life is entirely inward, and a mischievous gravity which acquires a silver patina with age.
Muriel Barbery
I'm in love with New York. It matches my mood. I'm not overwhelmed. It is the suitable scene for my ever ever heightened life. I love the proportions, the amplitude, the brilliance, the polish, the solidity. I look up at Radio City insolently and love it. It's all great, and Babylonian. Broadway at night. Cellophane. The newness. The vitality. True, it is only physical. But it's inspiring. Just bring your own contents, and you create a sparkle of the highest power. I'm not moved, not speechless. I stand straight, tough and I meet the impact. I feel the glow and the dancing in everything. The radio music in the taxis, scientific magic, which can all be used lyrically. That's my last word. Give New York to a poet. He can use it. It can be poetized. Or maybe that's mania of mine, to poetize. I live lightly, smoothly, actively, ears or eyes wide open, alert, oiled! I feel the glow and the dancing in every thing and the tempo is like that of my blood. I'm at once beyond, over and in New York, tasting it fully.
Anaïs Nin
The man slips along the stoically congealed houses Perpendicular like them A moving ornament Burning fiction His fragility contradicts the duration of his torments
Hélène Baronne d’Oettingen
The City is free of sinThe snow has given it absolution A man who slips A horse that fallsOh no, the city is in a nightgown
Pierre Albert-Birot
Do you remember the long orphanage of the train stationsWe crossed cities that turn-tabled all dayAnd vomited at night the sunshine of the day ("The Voyager")
Pierre Albert-Birot
Nice is a city of ghosts and specters, but I hope not to become one of them right away.
Patrick Modiano
An age-old city is like a pond. With its colours and reflections. Its chills and murk. Its ferment, its sorcery, its hidden life.A city is like a woman, with a woman’s desires and dislikes. Her abandon and restraint. Her reserve - above all, her reserve.To get to the heart of a city, to learn its most subtle secrets, takes infinite tenderness, and patience sometimes to the point of despair. It calls for an artlessly delicate touch, a more or less unconditional love. Over centuries.Time works for those who place themselves beyond time.You’re no true Parisian, you do not know your city, if you haven’t experienced its ghosts. To become imbued with shades of grey, to blend into the drab obscurity of blind spots, to join the clammy crowd that emerges, or seeps, at certain times of day from the metros, railway stations, cinemas or churches, to feel a silent and distant brotherhood with the lonely wanderer, the dreamer in his shy solitude, the crank, the beggar, even the drunk - all this entails a long and difficult apprenticeship, a knowledge of people and places that only years of patient observation can confer.
Jacques Yonnet
Zeal is very blind or badly regulated when it encroaches upon the rights of others.
Pasquier Quesnel
If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one's youth one's greatest indignation would be for what one has become.
André Gide
The joy of the young is to disobey - but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
Jean Cocteau
Youth has become a class.
Roger Vadim
You never see the old austerity That was the essence of civility Young people hereabouts unbridled now Just want.
Molière
Whatever we conceive well we express clearly.
Nicolas Boileau
I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.
Charles Baudelaire
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable so with autobiography.
Hilaire Belloc
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and as if by magic we see a new meaning in it.
Anaïs Nin
The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat - Like an unsuccessful literary man.
Hilaire Belloc
I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal
Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.
André Maurois
Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
Roland Barthes
When I am dead I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet but his books were read.'
Hilaire Belloc
Get black on white.
Guy de Maupassant
The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose not his individuality but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I quote others in order to better express my own self.
Michel de Montaigne
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
Albert Camus
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody but one whom nobody can imitate.
Francois Rene De Chateaubriand
Thought flies and words go on foot.
Julien Green
I walk firmer and more secure up hill than down.
Michel de Montaigne
The same wind that extinguishes a light can set a brazier on fire.
Pierre de Beaumarchais
Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
E. M. Cioran
To say that my grief will be eternal would be ridiculous - nothing is eternal.
Marie Bashkirtseff
In order to have great happiness you have to have great pain and unhap-piness - otherwise how would you know when you're happy?
Leslie Caron
To conquer without risk is to triumph without glory.
Pierre Corneille
The greater the obstacle the more glory in overcoming it.
Molière
Worry is the cross which we make for ourselves by overanxiety.
Francois de Fenelon
Our worst misfortunes never happen and most miseries lie in anticipation.
Honoré de Balzac
We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck and the house is never burgled and the ship never goes down.
Jean Anouilh