Quotes by French Authors - Page 35

Don't worry so much about 'not supposed to'.
Joanne Harris
Boredom was at the root of Lazare's unhappiness, an oppressive, unremitting boredom, exuding from everything like the muddy water of a poisoned spring. He was bored with leisure, with work, with himself even more than with others. Meanwhile he blamed his own idleness for it, he ended by being ashamed of it.
Émile Zola
A bouquet yellow like remorse Hurts my view The cage The wheel The vile ennui of all mankind And no one no one to break my chains!("Outcries")
Hélène Baronne d’Oettingen
What an odd creature you are, Bernard, with your constant fear of death! Do you never have a feeling, as I do, of utter futility? No? Doesn't it occur to you that the sort of life people like us lead is remarkably like death?
François Mauriac
His eagerness had turned into a routine; he embraced her at the same time every day. It was a habit like any other, a favourite pudding after the monotony of dinner.
Gustave Flaubert
Soon, what was tedious was everything. 'Beautiful things, they're so tedious! Paintings, they're enough to drive you mad...How right you are, it's so tedious, writing letters!' In the end it was life itself that she declared to us was a bore, without one quite knowing from where she was taking her term of comparison.
Marcel Proust
But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart.
Gustave Flaubert
I am terrified of being bored.
Marie Antoinette
Every day the words that Keep-on-Dancin’ and the Gypsy imparted to me - theories, observations, advice and warnings - are substantiated and acquire deeper meaning.‘It’s not for nothing there are so many bistrots in Paris,’ Keep-on-Dancin’ asserted. ‘The reason so many people are always crowded into them isn’t so much they go there to drink but to meet up, congregate, come together, comfort each other. Yes, comfort each other: people are bored the whole time, and they’re scared, scared of loneliness and boredom. And they all carry around in their heart of hearts their own pet little arch-fear: fear of death, no matter how devil-may-care they might appear to be. They’d do anything to avoid thinking about it. Don’t forget, it’s with that fear all temples and churches were built. So in cities like this, where forty different races mingle together, everyone can always find something to say to each other.
Jacques Yonnet
Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom—ah the soul-destroying boredom—of long days of mild content.
Jean-Paul Sartre
My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
We are almost always bored by just those whom we must not find boring.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Extreme boredom provides its own antidote.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?
Gustave Flaubert
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
André Gide
The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
Albert Camus
I want to paint the way a bird sings.
Claude Monet
A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.
Marcel Proust
It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie.
Milan Kundera
A lie to get out of something, or take an advantage for oneself, that’s one thing; but a lie to make life more interesting—well, that’s entirely different.
Diana Vreeland
[W]hat is one to say of the writer who lies when he writes that he is lying?
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
The dead know everything, but don't give a damn.
Joanne Harris
Hast thou found out, Voltaire, that it is bliss to die, And does thy hideous smile over thy bleached bones fly?
Alfred de Musset
One must not permit oneself excesses, except with persons whom one wishes soon to leave.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Experiences teaches us that to love is not to gaze at one another but to gaze together in the same direction.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts.
Serge Gainsbourg
The more a man judges, the less he loves
Honoré de Balzac
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Death is the only serious preoccupation in life.
Alexandre Dumas
We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.
Anatole France
Even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth, we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Well, suppose we remain upon earth, after all? Suppose we bravely accept the death of our dreams at the same time as the death of our bodies? This beyond is decidedly uncertain, quite vague and mobile. I do not believe that it exists everywhere; I believe that it is nowhere except in our infantile imaginations. Born with us, it will end at the same moment that we do, to be born anew in our posterity. The beyond is the earthly tomorrow, as we bequeath it to our heirs and as they modify it by their efforts and in accordance with their tastes.
Rémy de Gourmont
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
Marcel Proust
What is tolerance? It is a necessary consequence of humanity. We are all fallible, let us then pardon each other's follies. This is the first principle of natural right.
Voltaire
I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.
Michel de Montaigne
There was no denying the fact that the death of sugarcane was sounding the knell for something else in the country. What can we call it?
Maryse Condé
Reading that pleases and profits, that together delights and instructs, has all that one should desire.
Jacques Amyot
I prefer the company of books. When I'm reading, I'm never alone, I have a conversation with the book. It can be very intimate. Perhaps you know this feeling yourself? The sense that you're having an intellectual exchange with the author, following his or her train thought and you accompany each other for weeks on end.
Sophie Divry
Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.
Marcel Proust
At the end of the afternoon she tore herself away from the story to go and buy some tobacco. This would be tricky on a holiday, but never mind, it was mainly a pretext so the story could settle and she'd have the pleasure of meeting up with her new friend again a bit later on.
Anna Gavalda
An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best.
Michel Houellebecq
The question isn't whether I have time to read or not (time that nobody will ever give me, by the way), but whether I'll allow myself the pleasure of being a reader.
Daniel Pennac
...reading good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries who had composed them, or rather, taking part in a well-conducted dialogue in which such minds reveal to us only the best of their thoughts
René Descartes
Yet man will never be perfect until he learns to create and destroy; he does know how to destroy, and that is half the battle.
Alexandre Dumas
I am concerned with facts of quite unverifiable intrinsic value, but which, by their absolutely unexpected violently fortuitous character, and the kind of associations of suspect ideas they provoke.
André Breton
He who every morning plans the transactions of that day and follows that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life.
Victor Hugo
It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr.
Napoléon Bonaparte
... the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed.
Marcel Proust
The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.
Albert Camus
It is not easy to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing to live with its actual relationships.
Albert Memmi
It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice.
Emil M. Cioran
People will continue to commit atrocities as long as they believe in absurdities.
Voltaire
There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.
Montesquieu
Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.
Marguerite Duras
Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.
François Truffaut
Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest.
Jean Douchet
My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.
Robert Bresson
The mole is an animal that digs passages searching for the sun. Sometimes he reaches the surface. When he looks at the sun he goes blind.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again.
Jean Renoir
The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way.Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.
Robert Bresson