Quotes by French Authors - Page 49

God! when you think of all the things you could do and yet somehow never do! All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn't come fast enough. Instead of being open, you're closed up tight. Thats's the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.
Simone de Beauvoir
A normal existence - what could be more irrational? It's fantastic the number of things you're forced not to think about in order to go from one end of the day to the other without jumping the track! And the number of memories that have to be driven from your mind, and truths that have to be evaded! "That's why I'm afraid to leave,' I said to myself. In Paris, near Robert, I manage without too much difficulty to avoid the traps; I carefully mark them, and there are alarm bells to warn me of dangers. But alone, under an unknown sky, what would happen to me? What truths would come suddenly to blind me? What chasms would open before me? Oh yes, chasms close, truths fade out - that is sure and certain; I've seen it happen often enough before. We're like those earthworms one vainly cuts in two, or those lobsters whose legs grow back again. But the moment of false agony, the moment you'd rather die than mend yourself once again - when I think of it, I lose heart. I try to reason with myself: 'Why should anything happen to me? But why shouldn't anything happen to me?' It's never safe to go off the beaten path. It's true, I feel a little stifled here, but you get used to being stifled. And a habit is never bad, despite what they say.
Simone de Beauvoir
Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and announces that existence is humiliated. The only reality is "anxiety" in the whole chain of being. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man "in whom existence is concentrated." This professor of philosophy writes without trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that "the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial than man himself." His interest in Kant extends only to recognizing the restricted character of his "pure Reason." This is to conclude at the end of his analyses that "the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with anguish." This anxiety seems to him so much more important than all the categories in the world that he thinks and talks only of it. He enumerates its aspects: boredom when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror when the mind contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of anxiety and "existence then delivers itself its own summons through the intermediary of consciousness." It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence "to return from its loss in the anonymous They." For him, too, one must not sleep, but must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this absurd world and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way amid these ruins.
Camus
Let us imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men.
Pascal
Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?' again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. 'It's intolerable you know
Simone de Beauvoir
As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.
Albert Camus
And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely the same thing.
Albert Camus
Let us see what words can do. Will you understand me, for a start, if I tell you that I have never known what I am? My vices, my virtues, are under my nose, but I can’t see them, nor stand far enough back to view myself as a whole. I seem to be a sort of flabby mass in which words are engulfed; no sooner do I name myself than what is named is merged in him who names, and one gets no farther. I have often wanted to hate myself and, as you know, had good reasons for so doing. But my attempted hatred of myself was absorbed into my insubstantiality and was nothing but a recollection. I could not love myself either, I am sure, though I have never tried to. But I was eternally compelled to be myself; I was my own burden, but never burdensome enough, Mathieu. For one instant, on that June evening when I elected to confess to you, I thought I had encountered myself in your bewildered eyes.You saw me, in your eyes I was solid and predictable; my acts and moods were the actual consequences of a definite entity. And through me you knew that entity. I described it to you in my words, I revealed to you facts unknown to you, which had helped you to visualize it. And yet you saw it, I merely saw you seeing it. For one instant you were the heaven-sent mediator between me and myself, you perceived that compact and solid entity which I was and wanted to be in just as simple and ordinary a way as I perceived you. For, after all, I exist, I am, though I have no sense of being; and it is an exquisite torment to discover in oneself such utterly unfounded certainty, such unsubstantiated pride. I then understood that one could not reach oneself except through another’s judgment, another’s hatred. And also through another’s love perhaps; but there is here no question of that. For this revelation I am not ungrateful to you. I do not know how you would describe our present relations. Not goodwill, nor wholly hatred. Put it that there is a corpse between us. My corpse.
Jean-Paul Sartre
For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
Albert Camus
How did I picture the life after the grave?I Fairly bawled out at him: 'A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.
Albert Camus
A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.
Jean-Paul Sartre
All she had to do was make the simplest of gestures - open her hands and let go her hold. She lifted one hand and moved the fingers of it; they responded, in surprise and obedience, and this obedience of a thousand little unsuspected muscles was in itself a miracle. Why ask for more?
Simone de Beauvoir
The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.
Simone de Beauvoir
I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.
Simone de Beauvoir
At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.
Albert Camus
There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four.
Albert Camus
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.
Albert Camus
There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
Simone de Beauvoir
Existence is illusory and it is eternal.
Albert Camus
What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Nothingness haunts Being.
Jean-Paul Sartre
If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.
Albert Camus
After awhile you could get used to anything.
Albert Camus
Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me,and I have followed the source of rivers towards theirsource or plunged into forests, always making for othercities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; andI could never turn back any more than a record can spinin reverse. And all that was leading me where ?To this very moment...
Jean-Paul Sartre
The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
There are two sorts of good wills. The one says, "I would do well, but it gives me trouble, and I will not do it." The other, "I wish to do well, but I have not as much power as I have will; it is this which holds me back." The first fills Hell, the second Paradise.
Francis de Sales
It is when the heavenly fire has departed and the soul is cool again that we discover the real quality of our will.
Jean Nicolas Grou
One can always find hands for a work of destruction.
André Gide
Do not become attached to anything that can destroy you in the course of time.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Epicurus said you should live for pleasure - adding that nothing brings more pleasure than a little sun and a glass of water. It is on this principle that our conjugal existence has rested for three years, devoted to making love, reading, eating excellent meals, spending a few days in a nice hotel by the sea, visiting out friends (not very many, all without children), going to concerts and movies, sleeping, cultivating our garden.
Benoît Duteurtre
You owe it to your loved ones as well as yourself to know and pursue your pleasures.
Mireille Guiliano
Sadists of Mlle Vinteuil's sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, the prerogative of the wicked. And when they allow themselves for a moment to enjoy it they endeavour to impersonate, to identify with, the wicked, and to make their partners do likewise, in order to gain the momentary illusion of having escaped beyond the control of their own gentle and scrupulous natures into the inhuman world of pleasure.
Marcel Proust
Among all the modes by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when — in this moment of deprivation — the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage — the insensate, agonising need to possess exclusively.
Marcel Proust
When he [Malevranche] happened to find Descartes' book entitled Man in a book shop on the rue Saint Jaques, he leafed through it, bought it and "read it with so much pleasure that he was forced at times to interrupt his reading, so loud were the beatings of his heart due to the extreme pleasure he had in doing so". Those who never put down a book of erudition, science or philosophy, to catch their breath, so to speak, and recover from the strong emotion they experience, certainly ignore of of the most exquisite pleasures of intellectual life.
Étienne Gilson
I don't want to write a mass before being in a state to do it well, that is a Christian. I have therefore taken a singular course to reconcile my ideas with the exigencies of Academy rules. They ask me for something religious: very well, I shall do something religious, but of the pagan religion. . . . I have always read the ancient pagans with infinite pleasure, while in Christian writers I find only system, egoism, intolerance, and a complete lack of artistic taste.
Georges Bizet
With you I understood that pleasure is not something you give or take. It's a way of giving yourself and calling forth the gift of self from another person.
André Gorz
Unkindness is inspired by hatred, anger fuels it into action in which there is no great joy; it would take sadism to turn it into something pleasurable; unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.
Marcel Proust
Pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall.
Gustave Flaubert
... I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other...
Marcel Proust
Let an illness, a duel, a runaway horse make us see death face to face, and how richly we should have enjoyed the life of pleasure, the travels in unknown lands, which are about to be snatched from us! And no sooner is the danger past than we resume once more the same dull life in which none of those delights existed for us.
Marcel Proust
You learn more about life and people in two hours of war than in four decades of peace. War is dirty, sure, war is senseless, but come on! Civilian life is also senseless, in its sameness and it's reasonableness and because it dulls the instincts. The truth that no one dares speak aloud is that war is a pleasure, The greatest pleasure there is, otherwise it would stop immediately. Once you've tasted it, it's like heroin: you want more. (...) The taste for war, real war, is as natural to man as taste for peace, it's idiotic to want to eliminate it by repeating virtuously that peace is good and war is evil. In fact it's like men and women, yin and yang: you need both.
Emmanuel Carrère
From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime: or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well...
Michel de Montaigne
... since I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the variable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated and formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate object with which one seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the uneasiness which, in anticipation, one then feels. Hardly even does one think of oneself, but only how to escape from oneself.
Marcel Proust
... seeking to indicate to her by the extent of his gratitude the corresponding intensity of the pleasures which it was in her power to bestow on him, the supreme pleasure being to guarantee him immunity, for as long as his love should last and he remain vulnerable, from the assaults of jealousy.
Marcel Proust
Do the meager pleasures you have been able to enjoy during your fall compensate for the torments which now rend your heart? Happiness therefore lies only in virtue,my child, and all the sophistries of its detractors can never procure a single one of its delights.
Marquis de Sade
Pleasure can be supported by an illusion, but happiness rests upon truth.
Nicolas Chamfort
If one proceeds philosophically before proceeding poetically, and this is central to the philosopher, pleasure is crushed, But if one begins by having pleasure, it is like knowing how to swim: one never forgets it [Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, trans Elizabeth Lowe & Earl Fitz, Foreword by Hélène Cixous trans Verena Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989].
Hélène Cixous
... it was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect upon his character and conduct...
Marcel Proust
The glutton usually realizes that gout is ever ready to pounce, and that alcohol is bad for him. But possible disaster weighs light in the scale against certain pleasure.
Marcel Proust
I don’t think I’m made for any earthly kind of pleasure.
Claude Monet
It sometimes happens that pleasure blows anywhere it damn well chooses.
Louis Aragón
It was there, in particular, that I confirmed the truth that love, which we cry up as the source of our pleasures, is nothing more than an excuse for them.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Somewhere I’d heard, or invented perhaps, that the only pleasures found during a waning moon are misfortunes in disguise. Superstition aside, I avoid pleasure during the waning or absent moon out of respect for the bounty this world offers me. I profit from great harvests in life and believe in the importance of seasons.
Roman Payne
She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.
Émile Zola
It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life’s thorns
Marquis de Sade
But there must be some pleasure in condemning everything--in perceiving faults where others think they see beauties.''You mean there is pleasure in having no pleasure.
Voltaire
Maybe those sailors will write bad poems, but the same men would have kept dull diaries, too. The problem has to do not with the evidence but with the witness. The point is not the adventure but the adventurer. Reality cannot be directly rendered. Reality is a pile of bricks that can assume many forms.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
...and above all, you should not think of writing as a way of earning your living. If you do, your work will smell of your poverty. It will be colored by your weakness and be as thin as your hunger. There are other trades which you can take up: make boots, not books.
Marquis de Sade