Quotes by French Authors - Page 50

Your story is not a picture of life; it lacks the elements of truth. And why? Simply because you run straight on to the end; because you do not analyze. Your heroes do this thing or that from this or that motive, which you assign without ever a thought of dissecting their mental and moral natures. Our feelings, you must remember, are far more complex than all that. In real life every act is theresultant of a hundred thoughts that come and go, and theseyou must study, each by itself, if you would create a livingcharacter. 'But,' you will say, 'in order to note these fleetingthoughts one must know them, must be able to follow them in their capricious meanderings.You have simply to make use of hypnotism, electrical or human, which gives one a two-fold being, setting free the witness-personality so that it may see, understand, and remember the reasons which determine the personality that acts.
Jules Verne
I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay hands on everything they can get.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Ah, Caderousse,' said Andrea, 'how covetous you are! Two months ago you were dying with hunger.''The appetite grows by what it feeds on,' said Caderousse.
Alexandre Dumas
Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk and the will that moves.
Victor Hugo
I have built, deep in my heart, a chapel filled with you.
Marcel Proust
We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked.
Honoré de Balzac
War limits the deads. It limits them to the cimetery ... (La guerre limite les morts. - Les limite au cimetière...)
Charles de Leusse
Better beware of the newly deadOf the white-handed ghostAnd the brightness of these lamps . . .
Luc Berimont
Better beware of the newly deadOf the white-handed ghostAnd the brightness of these lamps . . .wrote Luc Berimont in 1940, in Reign of Darkness.I’ve always felt the greatest reluctance to go anywhere near, to touch, a fresh corpse. For me, it’s an unseemly thing. Useless. Hostile. Cunning. Dangerous. The ‘presence’ is much stronger, more perceptible one hour after death than one hour before. By my observation, this was not the case with Heisserer.He was entirely absent from his head, his hands,his quivering body. He was gone instantly, unburdened of his absurd life, released.
Jacques Yonnet
For a trial is initiated not to render justice but to annihilate the defendant.Even when the trial is of dead people, the point is to kill them off a second time: by burning their books; by removing their names from the schoolbooks; by demolishing their monuments; by rechristening the streets that bore their names.
Milan Kundera
Tonight the thoughts of the dead are turning back to the earth.
Joë Bousquet
A miscreant with coiffed, scented hair, a slender waist, the hips of a woman and the chest of a Prussian officer, with a finely tied cravat, by all girls admired. ~ [ introduction of character Montparnasse ]
Victor Hugo
It is at the family fireside, often under the shelter of the law itself, that the real tragedies of life are acted; in these days traitors wear gloves, scoundrels cloak themselves in public esteem, and their victims die broken-hearted, but smiling to the last. What I have just related to you is almost an every-day occurrence; and yet you profess astonishment.
Émile Gaboriau
An event is never just what it is in itself and nothing more. It’s what goes on around it, at the same time, that makes it — potentially — a tragic situation.You have to have been exposed to this, at least once, to understand it.
Jacques Yonnet
The ring which you are holding, my friend, is identical to that one. I had it cut according to the model of the king's ring, and damascened in Spain. The original is still in the Escorial; it would have been pleasant to steal it, for I easily acquire the instincts of a thief when I am in a museum, and I always find objects which have a history - especially a tragic history - uniquely attractive. I am not an Englishman for nothing - but that which is easily enough accomplished in France is not at all practical in Spain: the museums there are very secure.
Jean Lorrain
...our family became a place where you screamed for help but no one heard, not ever.
Marceline Loridan-Ivens
The tragedy in a man’s life is what dies inside of him while he lives.
Albert Schweitzer
The pleasure of criticism takes away from us the pleasure of being deeply moved by very fine things.
Jean de La Bruyère
In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.
Voltaire
We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly, and because there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it, those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship, for to undertake to wound or offend a man for his own good is to have a healthy love for him.
Michel de Montaigne
All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning -- not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.
Michel Foucault
If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.
George Steiner
[The critic] serves up his erudition in strong doses; he pours out all the knowledge he got up the day before in some library or other, and treats in heathenish fashion people at whose feet he ought to sit, and the most ignorant of whom could give points to much wiser men than he.Authors bear this sort of thing with a magnanimity and a patience that are really incomprehensible. For, after all, who are those critics, who with their trenchant tone, their dicta, might be supposed sons of the gods? They are simply fellows who were at college with us, and who have turned their studies to less account, since they have not produced anything, and can do no more than soil and spoil the works of others, like true stymphalid vampires.
Théophile Gautier
If you love my work, you are a good critic. If you do not love my work, you are a 'not good' critic.
Roman Payne
People quickly grow accustomed to being the slaves of mystery.
Guillaume Apollinaire
Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua.
Julio Cortázar
Anyone who finds himself incapable of grasping the complexities of a work hides his withdrawal behind the most superficial pretext because he has not gotten past the surface.
Julio Cortázar
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
Gustave Flaubert
A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground.
Victor Hugo
If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.
François de La Rochefoucauld
How did writing come to me? Like bird’s down on my windowpane, in winter. Just then there rose in the heart a struggle of firebrands, which has, still now, not ended.
René Char
Basically, having a gift for happiness was a bit like being good at maths or games: it depended partly on the development of the brain after you were born, ad even before, but also on how your parents or other adults had brought you up when you were small. And of course on your own efforts and subsequent encounters.'Nature or nurture,' said the professor. 'Whichever way, the parents are to blame!
François Lelord
Be classy. Anything but trashy.
Coco Chanel
What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.
Roman Payne
A girl without braidsis like a city without bridges.
Roman Payne
She was a free bird one minute: queen of the world and laughing. The next minute she would be in tears like a porcelain angel, about to teeter, fall and break. She was brave, and I never once saw her cry out of fear. She never cried because she was afraid that something would happen; she would cry because she feared something that could render the world more beautiful, would not happen… She believed if I gave in to make her fortune become realized, the world would be ultimately profound and beautiful. I guess I held out because I feared the realization of her fortune would mean the destruction of us together. And each time she cried, I fell a little more deeply in love with her.
Roman Payne
He was a kind of éminence grise, a political leader, in a clandestine movement. Everyone knows there are girls who go for that kind of thing. There are girls who go for Huysmanists, for that matter. I once met a girl -- a pretty, attractive girl -- who told me she fantasized about Jean-François Copé. It took me several days to get over it. Really, with girls today, all bets are off.
Michel Houellebecq
A girl without braids is like a city without bridges.
Roman Payne
To tell the truth, girls are no longer the way they used to be. They play gangsters, nowadays, just like boys. They organize rackets. They plan holdups and practice karate. They will rape defenseless adolescents. They wear pants... Life has become impossible.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focii. Facts are one, ideas are the other.
Victor Hugo
I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...
Emil M. Cioran
It is because the will has no power to bring about salvation that the idea of secular morality is an absurdity. What is called morality only depends on the will in what is, so to speak, its most muscular aspect. Religion on the contrary corresponds to desire, and it is desire that saves...To long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save.
Simone Weil
I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.
Emil M. Cioran
I learn life from the poets.
Germaine de Staël
If it is ones lot to be cast among fools, one must learn foolishness.
Alexandre Dumas
We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it... We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely.
Anaïs Nin
We are much harder on people who betray us in small ways than on people who betray others in great ones.
François de La Rochefoucauld
When a man loves a woman, as our old troubadours used to say, even if he has heard or seen something that puts his beloved in a bad light, he should believe neither his ears nor his eyes, he should listen to his heart alone.
Marquis de Sade
Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.
Milan Kundera
Betrayal is beautiful.
Jean Genet
I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.
Blaise Pascal
He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it.
Anaïs Nin
This man [Alexander von Humboldt] is as knowledgeable as a whole academy.
Claude Louis Berthollet
[Audubon's works are] the most splendid monuments which art has erected in honor of ornithology.
Georges Cuvier
She is not my mistress,' replied the young sailor gravely, ‘she is my betrothed.’'Sometimes one and the same thing,' said Morrel, with a smile.'Not with us, sir,' replied Dantes.
Alexandre Dumas
Enough,' said Mercedes, 'enough Edmond! Believe me that she who alone recognized you has been the only one to comprehend you. And had she crossed your path, and you had crushed her like a frail glass, still, Edmond, still she must have admired you! Like the gulf between me and the past, there is an abyss between you, Edmond, and the rest of mankind; and I tell you freely, that the comparison I drew between you and other men will be one of my greatest tortures. No! there is nothing in the world to resemble you in worth and goodness!
Alexandre Dumas
It strikes me you might place your gifts better. Why should you send powder to a ruffian who will use it to commit crimes? But for the deplorable weakness every one here seems to have for the bandits, they would have disappeared out of Corsica long ago.""The worst men in our country are not those who are 'in the country.'""Give them bread, if it so please you. But I will not have you supply them with ammuni
Prosper Mérimée
She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:--"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you."She tried to smile once more and expired.
Victor Hugo
He said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being." He said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being." -Jean Valjean about Cossette-
Victor Hugo
True, I have raped history, but it has produced some beautiful offspring.
Alexandre Dumas