Quotes by French Authors - Page 34

Nothing is mightier than our why, nothing stands above it, because in the end there is a why to which no answer is possible. In fact, from why to why, from one step to the next, you get to the end of things. And it is only by travelling from one why to the next, as far as the why that is unanswerable, that man attains the level of the creative principle, facing the infinite, equal to the infinite maybe. So long as he can answer the why he gets lost, he loses his way among things. 'Why this?' I answer, 'because that," and from one explanation to the next I reach the point where no explanation is satisfying, from one explanation to the next I reach zero, the absolute, where truth and falsehood are equivalent, become equal to one another, are identified with one another, cancel each other out in face of the absolute nothing. And so we can understand how all action, all choice, all history is justified, at the end of time, by a final cancelling-out. The why goes beyond everything. Nothing goes beyond the why, not even the nothing, because the nothing is not the explanation; when silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate why, that great why is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out, there is nothing more to make out.
Eugène Ionesco
What about you, Michel, what are you going to do here?'The response closest to the truth was probably something like 'Nothing'; but it's always difficult to explain that kind of thing to an active person.
Michel Houellebecq
Élodie, who was rising fifteen, lifted her anaemic, puffy, virginal face with its wispy hair; she was so thin-blooded that good country air seemed only to make her more sickly.
Émile Zola
Whenever people talk in the abstract about the pros and cons of immigration, one should not forget that immigrants are individual human beings whose lives happen not to fit neatly within national borders – and that like all human beings, they are all different.How different, though? Different better, or different worse? Such basic questions underlie whether people are willing to accept outsiders in their midst
Philippe Legrain
It is good to know that out there, in a forest in the world, there is a cabin where something is possible...
Sylvain Tesson
A minimum put to good use is enough for anything.
Jules Verne
He was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different kind of culture, literary or artistic, for which their professional specialisation has no use but by which their conversation profits.
Marcel Proust
Moreover it is easier, in the informality of conversation, to achieve that excitement and incoherence which is the true eloquence of love.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Tamina serves coffee and calvados to the customers (there aren't all that many, the room being always half empty) and then goes back behind the bar. Almost always there is someone sitting on a barstool, trying to talk to her. Everyone likes Tamina. Because she knows how to listen to people.But is she really listening? Or is she merely looking at them so attentively, so silently? I don't know, and it's not very important. What matters is that she doesn't interrupt anyone. You know what happens when two people talk. One of them speaks and the other breaks in: "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." and starts talking about himself until the first one manages to slip back in with his own "It's absolutely the same with me, I..."The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others. The whole secret of Tamina's popularity is that she has no desire to talk about herself. She submits to the forces occupying her ear, never saying: "It's absolutely the same with me, I...
Milan Kundera
Never sell the bear's skin before one has killed the beast.
Jean de La Fontaine
All I know: I could only encounter you, my oasis, coming out of a desert. Deserted myself. This is all right. My futureless and solitary self. When suddenly I hear the voice of the springs--Right away you made me want to sing. To cry. Then to drink. But after the desert, the merest trickle of water sounds like a storm. And ever since, Promethea's every murmur shakes my life like an earthquake. I was asleep. I was not thirsty. It would have been possible for me not to hear the first three tears. Ever since I never sleep. I listen.
Hélène Cixous
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
Roland Barthes
Writing is the painting of the voice.
Voltaire
Without patience, without absence of anger, no one can be called a politician.
Stendhal
And to every man has been assigned a good and an evil angel; one assisting him and the other annoying him, from his cradle to his coffin.
Voltaire
We say sound things when we do not strive to say to say extraordinary ones.
Comte de Lautréamont
If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.
Napoléon Bonaparte
This haze of blood must subside, the palace must collapse under the weight of the riches it conceals, the orgy must finish and the time come to awaken.
Gustave Flaubert
Such days of autumnal decline hold a strange mystery which adds to the gravity of all our moods.
Charles Nodier
A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives--all bear secret relations to our destinies.
Francois Rene De Chateaubriand
Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.
Rémy de Gourmont
The chemists who uphold dualism are far from being agreed among themselves; nevertheless, all of them in maintaining their opinion, rely upon the phenomena of chemical reactions. For a long time the uncertainty of this method has been pointed out: it has been shown repeatedly, that the atoms put into movement during a reaction take at that time a new arrangement, and that it is impossible to deduce the old arrangement from the new one. It is as if, in the middle of a game of chess, after the disarrangement of all the pieces, one of the players should wish, from the inspection of the new place occupied by each piece, to determine that which it originally occupied.
Auguste Laurent
A man who should undertake to inquire into everything for himself, could devote to each thing but little time and attention. His task would keep his mind in perpetual unrest, which would prevent him from penetrating to the depth of any truth, or of grappling his mind indissolubly to any conviction. His intellect would be at once independent and powerless. He must therefore make his choice from amongst the various objects of human belief, and he must adopt many opinions without discussion, in order to search the better into that smaller number which he sets apart for investigation. It is true that whoever receives an opinion on the word of another, does so far enslave his mind; but it is a salutary servitude which allows him to make a good use of freedom.A principle of authority must then always occur, under all circumstances, in some part or other of the moral and intellectual world. Its place is variable, but a place it necessarily has. The independence of individual minds may be greater, or it may be less: unbounded it cannot be. Thus the question is, not to know whether any intellectual authority exists in the ages of democracy, but simply where it resides and by what standard it is to be measured.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself.
Coco Chanel
Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly.
St. Francis de Sales
If man--if each one of us--abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each one of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinates will be transformed into inevitabilities.
Jacques Ellul
It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at present.
Émile Durkheim
In the savage horde the most vagabond, as well as in the most civilized nations of Europe, man is only what he is made to be by external circumstances; he is necessarily elevated by his equals; he contracts from them his habits and his wants; his ideas are no longer his own; he enjoys, from the enviable prerogative of his species, a capacity of developing his understanding bu the power of initiation, and the influence of society.
Jean Marc Gaspard Itard
He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.
Milan Kundera
The forest is only waiting for their signal to start trembling, hissing, and roaring from its depths. An enormous, love-maddened, unlighted railway station, full to bursting. Whole trees bristling with living noise makers, mutilated erections, horror.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. Defeat may prove to have been the only path to resurrection, despite its ugliness. I take it for granted that to create a tree I condemn a seed to rot. If the first act of resistance comes too late it is doomed to defeat. But it is, nevertheless, the awakening of resistance. Life may grow from it as from a seed.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
As a teenager, I didn’t want to be me; I wanted to be many different people. Maybe I realized that they all lived inside me and that if I managed to connect with them, they would become aspects of me.
Marion Cotillard
Formerly these harsh cells in which the discipline of the prison leaves the condemned to himself were composed of four stone walls, a ceiling of stone, a pavement of tiles, a camp bed, a grated air-hole, a double iron door, and were called "dungeons" ; but the dungeon has been thought too horrible; now it is composed ofan iron door, a grated air-hole, a camp bed, a pavement of tiles, a ceiling of stone, four stone walls, and it is called "punishment cell.
Victor Hugo
How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure.
Alexandre Dumas
Lazareff believed that "a journalists first duty is to be read," but Camus felt it was to tell the truth as much as possible, with as much style as possible. Camus saw "Lazareffism" as unacceptable journalism, a mixture of political submissiveness, raw crime, and nonsense. Pia and Camus hated the spineless large-circulation press, which followed orders and catered to its readers' lower instincts.
Olivier Todd
The fault I find in our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other everyday, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.
Marcel Proust
People sometimes imagine that just because they have access to so many newspapers, radio and TV channels, they will get an infinity of different opinions. Then they discover that things are just the opposite: the power of these loudspeakers only amplifies the opinion prevalent at a certain time, to the point where it covers any other opinion.
Amin Maalouf
I am a mediocre being, a bit cunning.
Renée Vivien
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it sho
Blaise Pascal
Look, the job of life is to turn your negatives into positives
Michka Assayas
A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire
The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to live with purpose.
Michel de Montaigne
You know, the immortality of the soul, free will and all that -- it's all very amusing to talk about up to the age of twenty-two, but not after that. Then one ought to be giving one's mind to having fun without catching the pox, arranging one's life as comfortably as possible, having a few decent drawings on the wall, and above all writing well. That's the important thing: well-made sentences...and then a few metaphors. Yes, a few metaphors. They embellish a man's existence.
Théophile Gautier
There is not love of life without despair about life.
Albert Camus
I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?
Voltaire
Today, the mere idea of aristocracy is incompatible with the dominant ideology. But every people needs an aristocracy. It's an integral part of human nature and can't be dispensed with. The question then is not 'For or against aristocracy?' but 'What kind of aristocracy?
Guillaume Faye
We unlearn the art of speaking well when we cease to speak with God.
John Calvin
Human understanding more easily invents new things than new words.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
Jacques Derrida
Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
Milan Kundera
[About Pierre de Fermat] It cannot be denied that he has had many exceptional ideas, and that he is a highly intelligent man. For my part, however, I have always been taught to take a broad overview of things, in order to be able to deduce from them general rules, which might be applicable elsewhere.
René Descartes
But the conceited man did not hear him. Conceited people never hear anything but praise.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Your soulmate can also be your downfall. 
Guillaume Musso
Book and reader, if they meet up at the right moment, it can make sparks fly, set you alight, change your life. It can, I promise you.
Sophie Divry
Somehow my soul remembers it all, hers doesn't.
Hope Irving
Gifted Deirdre cast the spell that enabled our souls to eventually be reunited. She couldn't bear for us to be apart, and neither could I.
Hope Irving
To ensure the fairytale ends well, I will stand by her side until she trusts me.
Hope Irving
There is no way to find a logical way to deal with this when logic isn't involved.
Hope Irving
Love is winning the war without starting the war. (L'amour, c'est gagner la guerre - Sans commencer la guerre)
Charles de Leusse
Dreams rise in the darkness and catch fire from the mirage of moving light. What happens on the screen isn't quite real; it leaves open a vague cloudy space for the poor, for dreams and the dead. Hurry hurry, cram yourself full of dreams to carry you through the life that's waiting for you outside, when you leave here, to help you last a few days more in that nightmare of things and people. Among the dreams, choose the ones most likely to warm your soul.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline