Quotes by French Authors - Page 40

How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between.
Anaïs Nin
Men know the damage a few words can do to girls’ hearts, and, idiots that we are, we swoon away and fall into the trap, excited because at last a man has set one for us
Grégoire Delacourt
I fell in love with you because there was a mischief in your eyes.
Michka Assayas
We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening.
Marcel Proust
My fame will outshine that of Victor Hugo or Napoleon.
Raymond Roussel
The charm of fame is so great, that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.
Blaise Pascal
When one wants to be famous, one has to dive gracefully into rivers of the blood of cannon-blasted bodies.
Comte de Lautréamont
The greatest weakness of all is the great fear of appearing weak.
Jacques Benigne Bossuel
Your only chance of survival, if you are severely smitten, lies in hiding this fact from the woman you love, of feigning a casual detachment under all circumstances. What sadness there is in this simple observation! What an accusation against man! Love makes you weak, and the weaker of the two is oppressed, tortured, and finally killed by the other, who in his or her turn oppresses, tortures, and kills without having evil intentions, without even getting pleasure from it, with complete indifference; that's what men, normally, call love.
Michel Houellebecq
Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms .
Milan Kundera
Men’s strengths go hand in hand with their weaknesses. That is why there is no such thing as an invincible warrior, and why heroes die.
Shan Sa
It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down." -Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 76
Milan Kundera
The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Most people don't know how to ask the right questions. Mondo knew how to ask questions, just at the right time, when you weren't expecting it. People paused for a few seconds, they stopped thinking about themselves and their own business, they thought, and their eyes seemed to blur, because they remembered asking those questions themselves, long ago.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
One should never expect anyone to reply to one's questions.
Patrick Modiano
Scepticism does not abolish the world, it turns it into questions.
Milan Kundera
The critics greeted this book with a churlish and horrified outcry. Certain virtuous people, in newspapers no less virtuous, made a grimace of disgust as they picked it up with the tongs to throw it into the fire. Even the minor literary reviews, the ones that retail nightly the tittle-tattle from alcoves and private rooms, held their noses and talked of filth and stench. I am not complaining about this reception; on the contrary I am delighted to observe that my colleagues have such maidenly susceptibilities.
Émile Zola
The child watched its disappearance--he was astounded but dreamy. His stupefaction was complicated by a sense of the dark reality of existence. It seemed as if there were experience in this dawning being. Did he, perchance, already exercise judgment? Experience coming too early constructs, sometimes, in the obscure depths of a child's mind, some dangerous balance--we know not what--in which the poor little soul weighs God.Feeling himself innocent, he yielded. There was no complaint-THE IRREPROACHABLE DOES NOT REPROACH.(The Man Who Laughs)
Victor Hugo
They were so absorbed in their plotting that they did not hear Boule de Suif return. But the Comte's whispered 'shh!' made them all look up. There she was. A sudden silence fell, and at first a feeling of embarrassment prevented them from speaking to her. At last, however, the Comtesse, more of an adept than the rest in social duplicity, asked her: 'Did you enjoy the christening?
Guy de Maupassant
Between ourselves, there are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.
Michel de Montaigne
Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fin
Gustave Flaubert
... My mother, daroga, my poor, unhappy mother would never... let me kiss her... She used to run away... and throw me my mask!... Nor any other woman... ever, ever!... Ah, you can understand, my happiness was so great, I cried. And fell at her feet, crying... and I kissed her feet... her little feet... crying. You're crying, too, daroga... and she cried also... the angel cried!...
Gaston Leroux
We are born crying, and for good reason,' he reflected. 'And the rest of our lives is bound to be a muted reiteration of that cry.
Françoise Sagan
I shed more tears than God could ever have required.
Arthur Rimbaud
All sports for all people.
Pierre de Coubertin
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.
Eric Cantona
My best moment? I have a lot of good moments but the one I prefer is when I kicked the hooligan
Eric Cantona
Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
We disapprove of state education. Than the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Than the socialists say that we don't want an religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Than they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
Frédéric Bastiat
A life spent waiting for your paycheck, measured out in work hours...A lifetime spent buying everything retail while selling oneself wholesale - L'amour Existe (1960)
Maurice Pialat
It is from the death of the social that socialism will emerge, as it is from the death of God that religions emerge.
Jean Baudrillard
As the result of its systems and of its efforts, it would seem that socialism, notwithstanding all its self-compaceny, can scarcely help perceiving the monster of legal plunder. But what does it do? It disguises it cleverly from others, and even from itself, under the seductive names of fraternity, solidarity, organization, association. And because we do not ask so much at the hands of the law, because we only ask it for justice, it alleges that we reject fraternity, solidarity, organization, and association; and they brand us with the name of individualists. We can assure them that what we repudiate is not natural organization, but forced organization. It is not free association, but the forms of association that they would impose upon us. It is not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity. It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility. Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds Government and society. And so, every time we object to a thingbeing done by Government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the State--then we are against education altogether. We object to a State religion--then we would have no religion at all. We object to an equality which is brought about by the State then we are against equality, etc., etc. They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, beacuse we object to the cultivation of corn by the State.
Bastiat
It is so true, that the Socialists look upon mankind as a subject for social experiments, that if, by chance, they are not quite certain of the success of these experiments, they will request a portion of mankind, as a subject to experiment upon. It is well known how popular the ideaof trying all systems is, and one of their chiefs has been known seriously to demand of the Constituent Assembly a parish, with all its inhabitants, upon which to make his experiments. It is thus that an inventor will make a small machine before he makes one of the regular size. Thus the chemist sacrifices some substances, the agriculturist some seed and corner of his field, to make trial of an idea. But think of the difference between the gardener and his trees, between the inventor and his machine, between the chemist and his substances, between the agriculturist and his seed! The Socialist thinks, in all sincerity, that there is the same difference between himself and mankind. No wonder the politicians of the nineteenth century look upon society as an artifical production of the legislator's genius. This idea, the result of a classical education, has taken possession of all the thinkers and great writers of our country. To all these persons, the relations between mankind and the legislator appear to be the same as those that exist between the clay and the potter.
Bastiat
Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.
Émile Durkheim
Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.
Anaïs Nin
After the great Impressionists, and again after Van Gogh and Gaugin, people said, 'Painting is now played out.' But Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Roussel and Vuillard appeared and gave them the lie. 'We were wrong,' said the croakers, 'but this at any rate is the end.' Yet to refute them, and to prove that there is no end to art, still another generation of painters sprang up.
Ambroise Vollard
Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.
Annette Messager
The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature.
Gustave Flaubert
Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his [sic!] time but most people are far behind theirs.
Edgard Varèse
The creation of a painting takes as much trickery and premeditation as the commitment of a crime.
Edgar Degas
Little by little the agents have taken over the world. They don't do anything, they don't make anything, they just stand and take their cut.
Mœbius
Yes, this man had the persistence of an insect.
Patrick Modiano
And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.
Gustave Flaubert
They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. 'It is the Æolian harp of style,' thought Julien. 'Amid the most lofty thoughts about annihilation, death, the infinite, etc., I can see no reality save a shocking fear of ridicule.
Stendhal
Library-denigrators, pay heed: suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.
Joanne Harris
I observed on most collected stones the imprints of innumerable plant fragments which were so different from those which are growing in the Lyonnais, in the nearby provinces, and even in the rest of France, that I felt like collecting plants in a new world... The number of these leaves, the way they separated easily, and the great variety of plants whose imprints I saw, appeared to me just as many volumes of botany representing in the same quarry the oldest library of the world.
Antoine de Jussieu
I had a friend once who looked at his library and discovered that even if he completely stopped filmmaking (he was a filmmaker too) and just decided to read the books he had in his library, it would take him until he was 100 years old. He was a little bit panicked. But he was courageous. He went out of his house. He went to the bookstore. And he bought ten books.
Alain Resnais
Each one dreams the dream of life in his own way. I have dreamed it in my library; and when the hour shall come in which I must leave this world, may it please God to take me from my ladder—from before my shelves of books!...
Anatole France
There is no such thing as a special category of science called applied science; there is science and its applications, which are related to one another as the fruit is related to the tree that has borne it.
Louis Pasteur
I find that it is the best trade of all; for, whether we manage well or ill, we are paid just the same.
Molière
A shoemaker, in making a pair of shoes, cannot spoil a scrap of leather without having to bear the loss; but in our business we may spoil a man without its costing us a farthing. The blunders are never put down to us, and it is always the fault of the fellow who dies. The best of this profession is, that there is the greatest honesty and discretion among the dead; for you never find them complain of the physician who has killed them.
Molière
To her despair was added a philosophical dejection, the feeling of every thinker who, venturing an inquisitive finger beneath the velvet of a throne, comes upon the coarse pinewood . . . And then it was she fell victim to a still more painful disquiet. The dead man they had just carted off, like a lump of matter no longer of any use, made it hideously plain how closely hospitals resemble factories. Under the scalpel, living flesh is treated there like wood under the plane or steel under the rolling-mill.
Maurice Renard
The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire
Is religion defending our physical integrity or is it just opposed to fashion?
Marjane Satrapi
Grown-ups love figures. When you talk to them about a new friend, they never ask questions about essential matters.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
There is something divine in mindless beauty.
Albert Camus
It is because I know all that science can bring to the world that I shall continue my efforts to ensure that it contributes to the happiness of all men, whether they be white, black, or yellow, and not to their annihilation in the name of some divine mission or other.
Frédéric Joliot-Curie
I happen to know that history is nothing but a spin and metaphor, which is what all yarns are made up of, when you strip them down to the underlay. And what makes a hit or a myth, of course, is how that story is told, and by whom.
Joanne Harris
The world’s myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth.
René Girard
The resistance to the mimetic contagion prevents the myth from taking shape. The conclusion in the light of the Gospels is inescapable: myths are the voice of communities that unanimously surrender to the mimetic contagion of victimization.
René Girard