Quotes by French Authors - Page 32

One must work nothing but work and one must have patience.
Auguste Rodin
If you ask me what I came to do in this world I an artist I will answer you: T am here to live out loud.'
Émile Zola
An artist never really finishes his work he merely abandons it.
Paul Valéry
Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which throughout his lifetime he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles.
Albert Camus
Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted everything in fact which masks reality from us in order to set us face to face with reality itself.
Henri Bergson
Art is I science is we.
Claude Bernard
The scholar seeks the artist finds.
André Gide
I've been 40 years discovering that the Queen of all colours is black.
Auguste Renoir
The object of art is to give life a shape.
Jean Anouilh
We live in a rainbow of chaos.
Paul Cézanne
The fingers must be educated the thumb is born knowing.
Marc Chagall
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form - or else it is not art.
Jacques Barzun
A work of art cannot be satisfied with being a representation it should be a presentation.
Jacques Reverdy
Quarrels would not last long if the fault was only on one side.
La Rochefoucauld
Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish.
Paul Cézanne
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
Victor Hugo
It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
Pierre Beaumarchais
Weakness on both sides is as we know the motto of all quarrels.
Voltaire
Genius is personal decided by fate but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.
Le Corbusier
Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
Constantin Brancusi
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
Joseph Joubert
The materials of city planning are sky space trees steel and cement in that order and in that hierarchy.
Le Corbusier
Music is the child of prayer the companion of religion.
Chateaubriand
The artist is the confidant of nature flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him.
Auguste Rodin
I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin
A work of art has an author and yet when it is perfect it has something which is anonymous about it.
Simone Weil
Animals feed man eats die man of intellect alone knows how to eat.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck and ask anyone the house is never burgled and the ship never goes down.
Jean Anouilh
People living deeply have no fear of death.
Anaïs Nin
How often the fear of one evil leads into a worse.
Nicolas Bouleau-Despreaux
There are those who are so scrupulously afraid of doing wrong that they seldom venture to do anything.
Vauvenargues
Needless fear and panic over disease or misfortune that seldom materialize are simply bad habits. By proper ventilation and illumination of the mind it is possible to cultivate tolerance poise and real courage.
Elie Metchnikoff
He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.
Napoléon Bonaparte
He who fears he shall suffer already suffers what he fears.
Michel de Montaigne
No animal admires another animal.
Blaise Pascal
A microbe is so very small You cannot make him out at all.
Hilaire Belloc
My father was a Creole his father a Negro and his father a monkey my family it seems begins where yours left off.
Alexander Dumas
There is no passion so much transports the sincerity of judgement as doth anger.
Michel de Montaigne
Whoever wants to know the hearts and minds of America had better learn baseball.
Jacques Barzun
Forty is the old age of youth fifty is the youth of old age.
Victor Hugo
He had come to that time in his life (it varies for every man) when a human being gives himself over to his demon or to his genius according to a mysterious law which orders him either to destroy or to surpass himself.
Marguerite Yourcenar
When you are forty half of you belongs to the past. . . And when you are seventy nearly all of you.
Jean Anouilh
Few people know how to be old.
La Rochefoucauld
The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.
Simone de Beauvoir
I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.
Voltaire
Old age is a time of humiliations the most disagreeable of which for me is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.
Igor Stravinsky
The old repeat themselves and the young have nothing to say. The boredom is mutual.
Jacques Bainville
Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for being no longer in a position to give bad examples.
La Rochefoucauld
We give advice but we do not inspire conduct.
La Rochefoucauld
We only make a dupe of the friend whose advice we ask for we never tell him all and it is usually what we have left unsaid that decides our conduct.
Diane de Poitiers
If you aren't rich you should always look useful.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Pain is the root of knowledge.
Simone Weil
By becoming more unhappy we sometimes learn how to be less so.
Madame Swetchine
Even if misfortune is only good for bringing a fool to his senses it would still be just to deem it good for something.
Jean de La Fontaine
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
In my youth poverty enriched me but now I can afford wealth.
Marc Chagall
It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
Marcel Proust
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.
Victor Hugo
We say: mad with joy. We should say: wise with grief.
Marguerite Yourcenar
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
Marcel Proust