Quotes by French Authors - Page 21

We do not wish ardently for what we desire only through reason.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Intuition is given only to him who has undergone long preparation to receive it.
Louis Pasteur
The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice love passion.
Nadia Boulanger
It is the heart which experiences God not the reason.
Blaise Pascal
The heart has reasons which reason cannot understand.
Blaise Pascal
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The intellect is always fooled by the heart.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
Henri Bergson
No one is more liable to make mistakes than the man who acts only on reflection.
Vauvenargues
Great thoughts always come from the heart.
Vauvenargues
All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.
Blaise Pascal
Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Instinct guides the animal better than the man. In the animal it is pure in man it is led astray by his reason and intelligence.
Denis Diderot
Intuition ... appears to be the extrasensory perception of reality.
Dr. Alexis Carrel
Instinct is the nose of the mind.
Madame de Girardin
Inspiration and genius - one and the same.
Victor Hugo
A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.
Anatole France
The innocent is the person who explains nothing.
Albert Camus
Innocence finds not near so much protection as guilt.
La Rochefoucauld
Do you know what is more hard to bear than the reverses of fortune? It is the baseness the hideous ingratitude of man.
Napoleon
If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter the whole face of the earth would have been changed.
Pascal
A woman is more influenced by what she divines than by what she is told.
Ninon de l'Enclos
The only menace is inertia.
St. John Perse
Once conform once do what others do because they do it and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
Michel de Montaigne
Tolerance is a tremendous virtue but the immediate neighbours of tolerance are apathy and weakness.
Sir James Goldsmith
The nearer I approach the end the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous yet simple.
Victor Hugo
Never let me hear that foolish word again.
Mirabeau
Impossible is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools.
Napoleon
A good imitation is the most perfect originality.
Voltaire
Let us leave pretty women to men without imagination.
Marcel Proust
Imagination is the eye of the soul.
Joseph Joubert
He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
Joseph Joubert
The human race is governed by its imagination.
Napoleon
Imagination disposes of everything it creates beauty justice and happiness which is everything in this world.
Pascal
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 often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.
Coco Chanel
Painting is easy when you don't know how but very difficult when you do.
Edgar Degas
It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though limits to our abilities do not exist.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Lack of understanding is a great power. Sometimes it enables men to conquer the world.
Anatole France
Great things are accomplished by those who do not feel the impotence of man. This ... is a precious gift.
Paul Valéry
The little I know I owe to my ignorance.
Sacha Guitry
Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest without passion without business without entertainment without care. It is then that he recognizes that he is empty insufficient dependent ineffectual. From the depths of his soul now comes at once boredom gloom sorrow chagrin resentment and despair.
Blaise Pascal
If a soldier or labourer complains of the hardship of his lot set him to do nothing.
Blaise Pascal
Nothing sways the stupid more than arguments they can't understand.
Cardinal de Retz
Of all our faults the one that we excuse most easily is idleness.
La Rochefoucauld
We are lazier in our minds than in our bodies.
La Rochefoucauld
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.
Jules Renard
Great ideas are not charitable.
Henry de Montherlant
Hypocrisy is the homage which vice renders to virtue.
La Rochefoucauld
Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.
La Rochefoucauld
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
Honoré de Balzac
You can pretend to be serious but you can't pretend to be witty.
Sacha Guitry
Humour is an affirmation of dignity a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.
Romain Gary
I love my country better than my family but I love humanity better than my country.
François Fénelon
Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.
Albert Schweitzer
At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring in fits and starts.
Marcel Proust
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
Albert Camus
We wander through this life together in a semi-darkness in which none of us can distinguish exactly the features of his neighbour. Only from time to time through some experience that we have of our companion or through some remark that he passes he stands for a moment close to us as though illuminated by a flash of lightning. Then we see him as he really is.
Albert Schweitzer
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
Marcel Proust