Quotes by French Authors - Page 33

Suffering raises up those souls that are truly great it is only small souls that are made mean-spirited by it.
Alexandra David-Neel
Suffering! ... We owe to it all that is good in us all that gives value to life we owe to it pity we owe to it courage we owe to it all the virtues.
Anatole France
Man cannot remake himself without suffering for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
Dr. Alexis Carrel
Necessity is often the spur to genius.
Honoré de Balzac
Every failure made me more confident. Because I wanted even more to achieve things as revenge. To show that I could.
Roman Polanski
The struggle to the top is in itself enough to fulfill the human heart. Sisyphus should be regarded as happy.
Albert Camus
We always love those who admire us and we do not always love those whom we admire.
La Rochefoucauld
Distance is a great promoter of admiration!
Denis Diderot
Be like the bird that passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight feels them give way beneath her and yet sings knowing that she hath wings.
Victor Hugo
Our nature consists in motion complete rest is death.
Blaise Pascal
I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement it takes place every day.
Albert Camus
Blessed is he who carries within himself a god and an ideal and who obeys it - an ideal of art of science or gospel virtues. Therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions.
Louis Pasteur
There are only two forces that unite men - fear and interest.
Napoléon Bonaparte
In action be primitive in foresight a strategist.
René Char
Deliberation is the work of many men. Action of one alone.
Charles de Gaulle
Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means a complexity of words movements gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.
Eugène Ionesco
A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.
Jean Anouilh
Life leaps like a geyser for those who drill through the rock of inertia.
Dr. Alexis Carrel
Often the prudent far from making their destinies succumb to them.
Voltaire
One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.
André Gide
He who doesn't accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
Charles Baudelaire
Greatness of soul consists not so much in soaring high and in pressing forward as in knowing how to adapt and limit oneself.
Michel de Montaigne
A hero is a man who does what he can.
Romain Rolland
The chief pang of most trials is not so much the actual suffering itself as our own spirit of resistance to it.
Jean Nicholas Grou
We must like what we have when we don't have what we like.
Roger de Rabutin
The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambitions.
Vauvenargues
Better is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome stubbornness is stupid.
Simone de Beauvoir
A man must live in the world and make the best of it such as it is.
Michel de Montaigne
Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way but must accept his lot calmly even if they roll a few more upon it.
Albert Schweitzer
It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.
Simone de Beauvoir
It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.
Colette
Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones just as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire.
La Rochefoucauld
Ability is of little account without opportunity.
Napoleon
Sometimes when one person is missing the whole world seems depopulated.
Alphonse de Lamartine
We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.
La Rochefoucauld
Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.
Louis Pasteur
To achieve great things we must live as though we were never going to die.
Vauvenargues
Long is the road from conception to completion.
Molière
The best is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
Ant swarming CityCity full of dreamsWhere in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve
Charles Baudelaire
The panorama-city is a 'theoretical' (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.
Michel de Certeau
The same is true of stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But [the extermination of proper place names] (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a 'suspended symbolic order.' The habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, no, here 'there isn't any place special, except for my own home, that's all...There isn't anything.' Nothing 'special': nothing that is marked, opened up by a memory or a story, signed by something or someone else. Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only 'places in which one can no longer believe in anything.
Michel de Certeau
It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by [city practitioners', everyday citizens'] blindness. The neworks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.
Michel de Certeau
what does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, 'an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,' the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the 'discovery' of relics and legends: 'fleeting visions of the French countryside,' 'fragments of music and poetry,' in short, something like an 'uprooting in one's origins (Heidegger)? What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one's own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, or being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces.
Michel de Certeau
In science there is and will remain a Platonic element which could not be taken away without ruining it. Among the infinite diversity of singular phenomena science can only look for invariants.
Jacques Monod
The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.
George Steiner
He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves - in Man... For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
When you want to be well-liked in the world, you have to let a lot of people teach you things that you know and they don't.
Nicolas Chamfort
Decisiveness is often the art of timely cruelty.
Henry Becque
Astarte has come again, more powerful than before. She possesses me. She lies in wait for me.December 97My cruelty has also returned: the cruelty which frightens me. It lies dormant for months, for years, and then all at once awakens, bursts forth and - once the crisis is over - leaves me in mortal terror of myself.Just now in the avenue of the Bois, I whipped my dog till he bled, and for nothing - for not coming immediately when I called! The poor animal was there before me, his spine arched, cowering close to the ground, with his great, almost human, eyes fixed on me... and his lamentable howling! It was as though he were waiting for the butcher! But it was as if a kind of drunkenness had possessed me. The more I struck out the more I wanted to strike; every shudder of that quivering flesh filled me with some incomprehensible ardour. A circle of onlookers formed around me, and I only stopped myself for the sake of my self-respect.Afterwards, I was ashamed.I am always ashamed of myself nowadays. The pulse of life has always filled me with a peculiar rage to destroy. When I think of two beings in love, I experience an agonising sensation; by virtue of some bizarre backlash, there is something which smothers and oppresses me, and I suffocate, to the point of anguish.Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night to the muted hubbub of bumps and voices which suddenly become perceptible in the dormant city - all the cries of sexual excitement and sensuality which are the nocturnal respiration of cities - I feel weak. They rise up around me, submerging me in a sluggish flux of embraces and a tide of spasms. A crushing weight presses down on my chest; a cold sweat breaks out on my brow and my heart is heavy - so heavy that I have to get up, run bare-foot and breathless, to my window, and open both shutters, trying desperately to breathe. What an atrocious sensation it is! It is as if two arms of steel bear down upon my shoulders and a kind of hunger hollows out my stomach, tearing apart my whole being! A hunger to exterminate love.Oh, those nights! The long hours I have spent at my window, bent over the immobile trees of the square and the paving-stones of the deserted street, on watch in the silence of the city, starting at the least noise! The nights I have passed, my heart hammering in anguish, wretchedly and impatiently waiting for my torment to consent to leave me, and for my desire to fold up the heavy wings which beat inside the walls of my being like the wings of some great fluttering bird!Oh, my cruel and interminable nights of impotent rebellion against the rutting of Paris abed: those nights when I would have liked to embrace all the bodies, to suck in all the breaths and sup all the mouths... those nights which would find me, in the morning, prostrate on the carpet, scratching it still with inert and ineffectual fingers... fingers which never know anything but emptiness, whose nails are still taut with the passion of murder twenty-four hours after the crises... nails which I will one day end up plunging into the satined flesh of a neck, and...It is quite clear, you see, that I am possessed by a demon... a demon which doctors would treat with some bromide or with all-healing sal ammoniac! As if medicines could ever be imagined to be effective against such evil!
Jean Lorrain
Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.
Marcel Proust
Happiness is a beautiful fruit that tastes of cruelty.
Agnes Varda
It was the first time I saw the look on the face of the people I robbed: it was ugly. I was the cause of such ugliness, and the only thing that made me feel was a cruel pleasure which, I thought, was bound to transfigure my own face, to make me resplendent. I was then 23 years old. From that moment on, I felt capable of advancing in cruelty.
Jean Genet
Those who create are rare; those who cannot are numerous. Therefore, the latter are stronger.
Coco Chanel
There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.
Albert Camus
For the wine of Clochemerle is at once exquisite and treacherous; it charms first the nose, then the palate, finally the entire man. Mark well that if it makes a man drunk it does not do so malignantly. It produces an enchanting light-heartedness, an intellectual sparkle which liberates the drinker from the constraints and conventions which bind him in his daily life.
Gabriel Chevallier
Against an economism void of values other than those of exchange, protest stood for reuniting the festival and daily life, for transforming daily life into a site of desire and pleasure. The protesters were protesting against the fact, simultaneously obvious and ignored, that delight and joy, pleasure and desire, desert a society that is content with satisfaction—that is to say, catalogued, created needs that procure some particular object and evaporate in it.
Henri Lefebvre
I don't go after him. He's a funny sort of boy. I've known that from the start. Not just because he seems angry and contemptuous or the way he walks like a tough guy. Because of his smile - it's a child's smile.
Delphine de Vigan
For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
Gustave Flaubert