Quotes by French Authors - Page 41

Only two possible reactions to the mimetic contagion exist, and they make an enormous difference. Either we surrender and join the persecuting crowd, or we resist and stand alone. The first way is the unanimous self-deception we call mythology.
René Girard
If the Gospels were mythical themselves, they could not provide the knowledge that demythologizes mythology.
René Girard
It is growing cold. Winter is putting footsteps in the meadow. What whiteness boasts that sun that comes into this wood! One would say milk-colored maidens are dancing on the petals of orchids. How coldly burns our sun! One would say its rays of light are shards of snow, one imagines the sun lives upon a snow crested peak on this day. One would say she is a woman who wears a gown of winter frost that blinds the eyes. Helplessness has weakened me. Wandering has wearied my legs.
Roman Payne
Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.
Victor Hugo
Summer fell upon Paris, with everyone still intently following his own subterranean course of passion or habit and looking up like a startled creature of the night at the blazing June sun. Now, all of a sudden, there was an impelling necessity to go away, to give a continuation or a meaning to the winter that had just gone by.
Françoise Sagan
At my place I can really tell when winter has come.. It's when sunlight is pathetically crawling in my courtyard, incapable of reaching my window anymore.
Boulet
To survive the Canadian winter, one needs a body of brass, eyes of glass, and blood made of brandy.
Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce Lahontan
Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?
Charles Baudelaire
The winter will be long and bleak. Nature has a dismal aspect.
Charles Nodier
Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom
Charles Baudelaire
Nothing is wasted of time if you use the xperience wisely.
Auguste Rodin
Unknown situations offer us opportunities for fresh learning. When we judge these situations solely by our conscious logic, fear grips us; we turn these opportunities down. We close ourselves from new experiences. We stagnate.On the contrary, when we embrace these opportunities, we force our intuition to work in the face of risks. And then, when we observe our perceptions, actions, and reactions in these situations, we see our evolution. We break out of our limits.
Indrajit Garai
The human heart will never wrinkle.
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal de Sévigné
The truth for a man, it's what makes him a man.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
He takes a few dazed steps, the waiters turn out the lights and he slips into unconsciousness: when this man is lonely he sleeps.
Jean-Paul Sartre
He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why.
Marguerite Duras
Traumas produce their disintegrating effects in proportion to their intensity, duration and repetition. (1909)
Pierre Janet
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
Roland Barthes
Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitterness.
Gustave Flaubert
Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.
Anaïs Nin
Knowing and feeling are two different things, and feeling is what counts.
François Lelord
There, at a depth to which divers would find it difficult to descend, are caverns, haunts, and dusky mazes, where monstrous creatures multiply and destroy each other. Huge crabs devour fish and are devoured in their turn. Hideous shapes of living things, not created to be seen by human eyes wander in this twilight. Vague forms of antennae, tentacles, fins, open jaws, scales, and claws, float about there, quivering, growing larger, or decomposing and perishing in the gloom, while horrible swarms of swimming things prowl about seeking their prey.To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.
Victor Hugo
There were some that were of so rare a beauty that my pleasure on catching sight of them was enhanced by surprise. By what privilege, on one morning rather than another, did the window on being uncurtained disclose to my wondering eyes the nymph Glauconome, whose lazy beauty, gently breathing, had the transparence of a vaporous emerald beneath whose surface I could see teeming the ponderable elements that coloured it? She made the sun join in her play, with a smile rendered languorous by an invisible haze which was nought but a space kept vacant about her translucent surface, which, thus curtailed, became more appealing, like those goddesses whom the sculptor carves in relief upon a block of marble, the rest of which he leaves unchiselled. So, in her matchless colour, she invited us out over those rough terrestrial roads, from which, seated beside Mme. de Villeparisis in her barouche, we should see, all day long and without ever reaching it, the coolness of her gentle palpitation.
Marcel Proust
We are going toward the sea. I have swollen. I am carried away. Sometimes at night love comes up so quickly and so high, and if we have no little boat perhaps it is because we want to roll breathless under the ocean floor.
Hélène Cixous
I showed him the sea. It's a great luxury, being able to see it from the balcony. When cities are bombed there are always ruins and corpses left. But you can drop an atomic bomb in the sea and ten minutes later it's back as it was before. You can't change the shape of water.
Marguerite Duras
Nature is not embarrassed by difficulties of analysis. She avoids complication only in means. Nature seems to be proposed to do much with little: it is a principle that the development of physics constantly supports by new evidence.
Jean Fresnel
Alpha, known as the fine-structure constant, characterizes the interactions between matter and light. It has been very accurately measured in the laboratory. It is indeed the most precisely measured of all physical constants ... best memorized in the form ~ 1/137.
Jean-Philippe Uzan
Physicists believe that the Gaussian law has been proved in mathematics while mathematicians think that it was experimentally established in physics.
Henri Poincaré
The poet must be more useful than any other member if his tribe.
Comte de Lautréamont
Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
Gustave Flaubert
With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady’s album – and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say.
Gustave Flaubert
...because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.(in that case my friend Hubl would have pointe out to me, no one loves us more than the police. That's true. Just as every height has its symmetrical depth, so love's interest has ts negative the police's curiosity. We sometimes confuse depth with height, and I can easily imagine lonely people hoping to be taken to the police station from time to time for an interrogation that will enable to talk about themselves.)
Milan Kundera
Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
Charles de Gaulle
I was about as political as a bath towel.
Michel Houellebecq
Look: each moment is a cradle and a casket: may all life and all death seem strange to you.
Marcel Schwob
Look: each moment is a cradle and a casket: may all life and all death seem strange and new to you.
Marcel Schwob
We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.
Michel de Montaigne
No elevator of progress with wells of prejudices. (Pas d'ascenseur de progrès - Avec puits de préjugés.)
Charles de Leusse
Why is the determination to fight against a prejudice a sure sign that one is full of it? Such a determination necessarily arises from an obsession. It constitutes an utterly sterile effort to get rid of it. In such a case the light of attention is the only thing which is effective, and it is not compatible with a polemical intention.
Simone Weil
As she grew older, Maddy discovered that she had disappointed almost everyone. An awkward girl with a sullen mouth, a curtain of hair, and a tendency to slouch, she had neither Mae's sweet nature nor sweet face. Her eyes were rather beautiful, but few people ever noticed this, and it was widely believed Maddy was ugly, a troublemaker, too clever for her own good, too stubborn - or too slack - to change.Of course, folk agreed that it was not her fault she was so brown or her sister so pretty, but a smile costs nothing, as the saying goes, and if only the girl had made an effort once in a while, or even showed a little gratitude for all the help and free advice, then maybe she would have settled down.
Joanne Harris
In your occupations, try to possess your soul in peace. It is not a good plan to be in haste to perform any action that it may be the sooner over. On the contrary, you should accustom yourself to do whatever you have to do with tranquillity, in order that you may retain the possession of yourself and of settled peace.
Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon
This stretch through the fogbound forest gradually lulled Grange into his favorite daydream; in it he saw an image of his life: all that he had he carried with him; twenty feet away, the world grew dark, perspectives blurred, and there was nothing near him but this close halo of warm consciousness, this nest perched high above the vague earth.
Julien Gracq
You are to be pitied more than I, perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of the angels; for, as you have said, my place is not in your narrow sphere. You have the earth, I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid Ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep.
Herculine Barbin
We do not choose the one we fall in love with, and our perception of happiness is our own and is determined by what we experience...
Julie Maroh
The longest road to finding yourself is the one that begins at home, and ends at your home.
Ian Ségal
He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.
Victor Hugo
When you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive
Anaïs Nin
Twas easier to disarm the god of strengthThan this Hippolytus, for HerculesYielded so often to the eyes of beauty,As to make triumph cheap.― Jean Racine, Phèdre
Jean Racine
The woods, the vines, the very stones, were at one with the brightness of the sun and the unblemished sky, and even when the sky grew overcast, the multitude of leaves, as in a sudden change of tone, the earth of the roads, the roofs of the town, seemed as though caught up in the unity of a brand-new world. And all that Jean was feeling seemed without effort to chime with the surrounding oneness, and he was conscious of the perfect joy which is the gift of harmony.
Marcel Proust
[Patriotism] is in itself a kind of religion: it does not reason, but it acts from the impulse of faith and sentiment.
Alexis de Tocqueville
...patriotism has become a narrow offensive sentiment which as long as it lives will maintain war and exhaust the world
Henri Barbusse
The love we have for our native land would be good and praiseworthy if it did not degenerate, as we see it does everywhere, into vanity, the spirit of predominance, acquisitiveness, hate, envy, nationalism, and militarism
Henri Barbusse
Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter, The state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never
Cardinal Richelieu
The real propaganda is what—if we are genuinely a living member of a nation—we tell ourselves because we have hope, hope being a symbol of a nation's instinct of self-preservation. To remain blind to the unjustness of the cause of the individual "Germany," to recognise at every moment the justness of the cause of the individual "France," the surest way was not for a German to be without judgement, or for a Frenchman to possess it, it was, both for the one and for the other, to be possessed of patriotism.
Marcel Proust
I'm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country, that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black, has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man.
Gustave Flaubert
[Large countries'] patriotism is different: they are buoyed by their glory, their importance, their universal mission. The Czechs loved their country not because it was glorious but because it was unknown; not because it was big but because it was small and in constant danger. Their patriotism was an enormous compassion for their country.
Milan Kundera
She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness...A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there.
Anaïs Nin
Is it possible that mathematical pathology, i.e. chaos, is health? And that mathematical health, which is the predictability and differentiability of this kind of a structure, is disease?
Arnold Mandel
We are punctual, a stressed, marked characteristic. We need order around us, in the house, in the life, although we live by irresistible impulses, as if the order in the closets, in our papers, in our books, in our photographs, in our souvenirs, in our clothes could preserve us from chaos in our feelings, loves, in our work. Indifference to food, sobriety; but this, we admit, is the part of the war against a threatening fragility.
Anaïs Nin
What you call your lies are fiction and myths. The art of creating a disguise can be as beautiful as the creation of a painting… I created a woman for my artist life, bold, gay, courageous, generous, fearless; and another to please my father, a clear-sighted woman with a love of beauty, harmony, and self-discipline, critical and selective; and still another who lives in chaos, embraces the weak and the stumbling and the confused.
Anaïs Nin