Quotes by French Authors - Page 3

It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death... And they should! ...For they are in life.
Roman Payne
She spoke about it with such emphasis (somewhat affected) that I could see at once that I was hearing the manifesto of her generation. Every generation has its own set of passions, loves, and interests, which it professes with a certain tenacity, to differentiate it from older generations and to confirm itself in its uniqueness. Submitting to a generation mentality (to this pride of the herd) has always repelled me. After Miss Broz had developed her provocative argument (I've now heard it at least fifty times from people her age) that all mankind is divided into those who give hitchhikers lifts (human people who love adventure) and those who don't (inhuman people who fear life), I jokingly called her a "dogmatist of the hitch." She answered sharply that she was neither dogmatist nor revisionist nor sectarian nor deviationist, that those were all words of ours, that we had invented them, that they belonged to us, and that they were completely alien to them.
Milan Kundera
That is the definition of truth, it is the thing you must not say. “The miracle into which the child and the poet walk” [Tsvetaeva] as if walking home, and home is there…The thing that is both known and unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. Kafka says—one very small line lost in his writing—“to the depths, to the depths.
Hélène Cixous
I know that I too could try a story out, rebuild mine, make it live again several minutes before the full of the day, the sun, the city. But I haven't the strength, stupidly. I rise and carry on. One more time.
Danielle Collobert
Might one not say that in the chance combination of nature's production, since only those endowed with certain relations of suitability could survive, it is no cause for wonder that this suitability is found in all species that exist today? Chance, one might say, produced an innumerable multitude of individuals; a small number turned out to be constructed in such fashion that the parts of the animal could satisfy its needs; in another, infinitely greater number, there was neither suitability nor order: all of the later have perished; animals without a mouth could not live, others lacking organs for reproduction could not perpetuate themselves: the only ones to have remained are those in which were found order and suitability; and these species, which we see today, are only the smallest part of what blind fate produced.
Pierre-Louis Moreau De Maupertuis
Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise natural selection alone and unaided could have drawn all the music of the biosphere. In effect natural selection operates upon the products of chance and can feed nowhere else; but it operates in a domain of very demanding conditions, and from this domain chance is barred. It is not to chance but to these conditions that evolution owes its generally progressive course, its successive conquests, and the impression it gives of a smooth and steady unfolding.
Jacques Monod
In the end, only the truth will survive.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
It is the destiny of things real to destroy those that are artifice.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Women are extraordinary creatures!
Roman Payne
I sat up in the strange bed fearing it had been a dream, afraid I would never see her again. Not because I wanted anything from her, only her presence. The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death.
Roman Payne
The remembrance of a woman is longer than a tear. (Le souvenir d'une femme - Est plus long qu'une larme.)
Charles de Leusse
We are all very much alike in France in this respect; we still remain knights, knights of love and fortune, since God has been abolished whose bodyguard we really were. But nobody can ever get woman out of our hearts; there she is, and there she will remain, and we love her, and shall continue to love her, and go on committing all kinds of follies on her account as long as there is a France on the map of Europe; and even if France were to be wiped off the map, there would always be Frenchmen left.
Guy de Maupassant
In Sanskrit, there exists no word for ‘The Individual’ (L’Individu). En Grèce antique, il n’y avait aucun mot pour dire ‘Devoir’ (Duty). In French, the word for ‘Wife’ is the same as the word for ‘Woman.’ En anglais, nous n’avons aucun mot semblable à l’exquise ‘Jouissance!
Roman Payne
A very large percentage of illnesses are the expressions of inadequate responses to the environment.
René Dubos
It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.
Voltaire
. . . In all parts of our globe, fanatics have cut each other's throats, publicly burnt each other, committed without a scruple and even as a duty, the greatest crimes, and shed torrents of blood . . . Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under divers names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty. We find, in all the religions, 'a God of armies,' a 'jealous God,' an 'avenging God,' a 'destroying God,' a 'God,' who is pleased with carnage, and whom his worshippers consider it a duty to serve. Lambs, bulls, children, men, and women, are sacrificed to him. Zealous servants of this barbarous God think themselves obliged even to offer up themselves as a sacrifice to him. Madmen may everywhere be seen, who, after meditating upon their terrible God, imagine that to please him they must inflict on themselves, the most exquisite torments. The gloomy ideas formed of the deity, far from consoling them, have every where disquieted their minds, and prejudiced follies destructive to happiness.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governm
Guy de Maupassant
Darks drifts covered the horizon. A strange shadow approaching nearer and nearer, was spreading little by little over men, over things, over ideas; a shadow which came from indignations and from systems. All that had been hurriedly stifled was stirring and fermenting. Sometimes the conscious of the honest man caught its breath, there was so much confusion in that air in which sophisms were mingled with truths. Minds trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of the storm. The electric tension was so great that at certain moments any chance-comer, thought unknown, flashed out. Then the twilight darkness fell again. At intervals, deep and sullen mutterings enabled men to judge of the amount of lightning in the cloud.
Victor Hugo
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Never had we ever kissed as lovers; if we touched lips it was as brother and sister. In one moment of emotion, our lips fell together by accident, but we quickly removed ourselves as though we were children touching glass with dirty hands.
Roman Payne
I knelt and locked the door. I locked the door locking the world and time outside. I stretched my body across the mattress and Saskia drew in close to me and placed her open hand on my chest, her mouth near my shoulder; her breath, my breath blew out the candle, and I held my lost Wanderess with tenderness until sweet sleep overcame us.
Roman Payne
Your silence exists as does my self gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world's dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other, without taking breath away from them.
Luce Irigaray
I maintained a tactical silence. When you maintain a tactical silence and look people right in the eye, as if drinking in their words, they talk. People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows--every researcher, every writer, every spy.
Michel Houellebecq
If I could record them and transmit them to the present age, they would constitute nothing more, nowadays, than dead sounds. They would be, in a word, sounds other than what they actually were, and from what their phonographic labels pretended they were – since it's in ourselves that the silence exists. It was while the sounds were still mysterious that it would have been really interesting to render the mystery palpable and transferable.
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
I didn’t like having to explain to them, so I just shut up, smoked a cigarette, and looked at the sea.
Albert Camus
I did not wait to hear the end of my father's story, for I had been with him myself after mass when we had met M. Legrandin; instead, I went downstairs to the kitchen to ask about the menu for our dinner, which was of fresh interest to me daily, like the news in a paper, and excited me as might the programme of a coming festivity.
Marcel Proust
What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born. Her face, at once innocent and feral, soft and wild! Her mouth voluptuous. Eyes deep as oceans, her eyes as wide as planets. I likened her to the slender Psyché and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: the dusty hems of her bunched-up skirt, the worn straps of her nightshirt; the blackened soles of her tiny bare feet, the coal-stained balcony bricks upon which she sat, and that dusty wrought-ironwork that framed her perch. All this and the pungent air!—almost foul, with so many odors. Ô, that and the spicy night! …Pungency, spice, filth and night, dust and light; all things dark did blossom in sight; flower and bloom, the night has its pearl too—the moon! And once a month it will make the face of this tender girl bloom.
Roman Payne
[I]t is that we are too apt to despise what appears to be neither good nor beautiful, and thus we lose what is helpful and salutary.
George Sand
We are all lumps, and of so various and inform a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and others.
Michel de Montaigne
Quite half of the human race was in tears.
Marcel Proust
Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my childhood was ending in an explosion of unreal passion that made my life feel sacred and holy.
Roman Payne
Childhood memories surge back more vividly midway through life – like some palimpsest whose original text suddenly reappears after the manuscript has been chemically treated.
Gérard de Nerval
It is said that nothing in our lives is ever lost, that nothing can prevent its having been. That is why, so very often the weight of the past lies ineluctably upon the present. But that is why it is so real in memory, so wholly itself, so far beyond replacement.
Marcel Proust
Hélène slowly surveyed the room. In this respectable society, amongst these apparently decent middle-class people, were there none but faithless wives? With her strict provincial morality, she was amazed at the licensed promiscuity of Parisian life.
Émile Zola
If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent.
Albert Camus
Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.
Voltaire
The cat that laughs is crazy. Man who does not laugh is below... (Le chat qui rit est un fou. - Homme qui ne rit est dessous...)
Charles de Leusse
Man always becomes other. Man is the animal who continually differs from himself.
Georges Bataille
The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most “savage” or “barbarous” of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Certainly, they'd had to endure the war, but they had each other close by. They had never known the confusion of being a third-worlder, they had always a home!
Marjane Satrapi
Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous activities, but see that your soul remains your own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm waters where you can take refuge in sleep.
Albert Memmi
[Y]ou have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.
Anaïs Nin
He fills me with horror and I do not hate him. How can I hate him, Raoul? Think of Erik at my feet, in the house on the lake, underground. He accuses himself, he curses himself, he implores my forgiveness!...He confesses his cheat. He loves me! He lays at my feet an immense and tragic love. ... He has carried me off for love!...He has imprisoned me with him, underground, for love!...But he respects me: he crawls, he moans, he weeps!...And, when I stood up, Raoul, and told him that I could only despise him if he did not, then and there, give me my liberty...he offered it...he offered to show me the mysterious road...Only...only he rose too...and I was made to remember that, though he was not an angel, nor a ghost, nor a genius, he remained the voice...for he sang. And I listened ... and stayed!...That night, we did not exchange another word. He sang me to sleep.
Gaston Leroux
My hate is general, I detest all men;Some because they are wicked and do evil,Others because they tolerate the wicked,Refusing them the active vigorous scornWhich vice should stimulate in virtuous minds.
Molière
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal
A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.
Roman Payne
I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.
Antonin Artaud
I had, therefore, to resign myself to commissioning a duplicate from a jeweller in Madrid. They did the work very nicely. The claws are curiously shaped, but the true marvel is the stone; it is so very limpid and weighs many carats, but notice also how it is hollowed out! You see that drop of green oil which takes the place of the internal tear? It is a drop of poison, an Indian toxin which strikes so rapidly and so corrosively that it only requires to come into momentary contact with one of a man's mucous membranes to rob him of his senses and induce rigour mortis.'It is instant death, certain but painless suicide, that I carry in this emerald. One bite' - and Ethal made as if to raise the ring to his lips - 'and with a single bound one has quit the mundane world of base instincts and crude works, to enter eternity.'Look upon the truest of friends: a deus ex machina which defies public opinion and cheats the police of their prey...'He laughed briefly. 'After all, we live in difficult times, and today's magistrates are so very meticulous. Salute as I do, my dear friend, the poison which saves and delivers. It is at your service, if ever the day should come when you are weary of life!
Jean Lorrain
Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.
Édouard Levé
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
Marcel Proust
In my errant life I roamedTo learn the secrets of women and men,Of gods and dreams.I've known all the countries of our world,I've lived a thousand lives:Many lives I lived in love, Other lives I squandered.For in my life I never traveled, All I did was wander.
Roman Payne
God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed.
Simone Weil
For if we see that the sun, in sending forth its rays upon the earth, to generate, cherish, and invigorate its offspring, in a manner transfuses its substance into it, why should the radiance of the Spirit be less in conveying to us the communion of his flesh and blood? Wherefore the Scripture, when it speaks of our participation with Christ, refers its whole efficacy to the Spirit. Instead of many, one passage will suffice. Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans (Rom. 8:9-11), shows that the only way in which Christ dwells in us is by his Spirit. By this, however, he does not take away that communion of flesh and blood of which we now speak, but shows that it is owing to the Spirit alone that we possess Christ wholly, and have him abiding in us.
John Calvin
Imagine a society entirely absorbed in its own historicity. It would be incapable of producing historians. Living entirely under the sign of the future, it would satisfy itself with automatic self-recording processes and auto-inventory machines, postponing indefinitely the task of understanding itself
Pierre Nora
Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.
Arthur Rimbaud
Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.
Gilles Deleuze
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
Marcel Proust
Wherever you go in the next catastrophéBe it sickroom, or prison, or cemet’ryDo not fear that your stay will besolit’ryCountless souls share your fate,you’ll have company!
Roman Payne
The wretchedness of ordinary life, endured so gaily when it is part of our normal existence, is made far worse when it comes as something new, and is exaggerated by the working of the imagination.
Marcel Proust
Or rather, he was sad because that morning he'd understood that he'd understood nothing, because while he still understood nothing he wasn't sad at all, but now that he'd understood that he'd understood nothing he felt sad, if you follow.
François Lelord