Quotes by French Authors - Page 52

The dragon spits fire, what extinguishes its tears. When we live in rancor, we are born to be old. (Le dragon crache du feu, - Ce qui éteint ses larmes. - Quand on vit de rancune, - On naît pour être vieux.)
Charles de Leusse
A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.
Charles Baudelaire
Eternal snows are at the top. Eyes of beautiful are at the top. (Neiges éternelles sont au sommet. - Yeux de la belle sont au sommet.)
Charles de Leusse
There was a shepherd the other day up at Findon Fair who had come from the east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different from the eyes of other men.
Hilaire Belloc
The madness of the eyes is the lure of the abyss. Sirens lurk in the dark depths of the pupils as they lurk at the bottom of the sea, that I know for sure - but I have never encountered them, and I am searching still for the profound and plaintive gazes in whose depths I might be able, like Hamlet redeemed, to drown the Ophelia of my desire.
Jean Lorrain
Besides, those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians. As consolation can come to them only from the person who is the cause of their grief, and as their grief is an emanation from that person, it is there, in their grief itself, that they must in the end find a remedy: which it will disclose to them at a given moment, for as long as they turn it over in their minds this grief will continue to show them fresh aspects of the loved, the regretted creature, at one moment so intensely hateful that one has no longer the slightest desire to see her, since before finding enjoyment in her company one would have first to make her suffer, at another so pleasant that the pleasantness in which one has invested her one adds to her own stock of good qualities and finds in it a fresh reason for hope.
Marcel Proust
Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad, for any other goodness is usually merely inertia or lack of will-power
François de La Rochefoucauld
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
Milan Kundera
There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling. Every summit seems an exaggeration. Climbing wearies. The steepnesses take away one's breath; we slip on the slopes, we are hurt by the sharp points which are its beauty; the foaming torrents betray the precipices, clouds hide the mountain tops; mounting is full of terror, as well as a fall. Hence, there is more dismay than admiration. People have a strange feeling of aversion to anything grand. They see abysses, they do not see sublimity; they see the monster, they do not see the prodigy.
Victor Hugo
What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?
Jean-Paul Sartre
Hatred becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation.
Victor Hugo
He let Julius go. There was beginning to rise in him a feeling of profound disgust--a kind of hatred almost, of himself, of Julius, of everything.
André Gide
Hatred needs scorn. Scorn is hatred's nectar!
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
I already knew that I had the ability to free myself from hatred, and I viewed this as my most significant conquest.
Ingrid Betancourt
Booty Butt, Booty Butt, Booty Butt Cheeks
René Descartes
Somewhere within the meeting of our eyes, our souls were bonding, even if our day to day lives were far apart.
Carol Drinkwater
Ne dites pas trop de mal de vous-meme: on vous croirait. - Don't talk too badly of yourself: they ight believe you.
André Maurois
Eloquence.— We need both what is pleasing and what is real, but that which pleases must itself be drawn from the true.
Blaise Pascal
[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.
Antonin Artaud
Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.
François Mauriac
Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.
Jean-Paul Sartre
When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep's: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster.
Maurice Blanchot
My girl was mad and I loved her. Upon a night, she read my poetry; and kissing me madly she cried, ‘You are a genius, my love!’ To which I replied, ‘My girl,’ whispering, ‘Every doctor in this land with a prescription pad is more of a genius than I.
Roman Payne
The origin of illness may be in the past, but the virulent crisis must be dynamically tackled. I believe in attacking the core of the illness, through its present symptoms, quickly, directly. The past is a labyrinth. One does not have to step into it and move step by step through every turn and twist. The past reveals itself instantly, in today’s fever or abscess of the soul.
Anaïs Nin
The only people who are worth knowing are either saints, scoundrels or madmen; at least their conversation is always interesting. Sensible people are dull by definition, because they are always harping on to the same boring tune about everyday life. They form part of the crowd, the more intelligent part perhaps, but the crowd for all that, and I’m sick of them.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination ... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.
Michel Foucault
As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad . . .
Emil M. Cioran
The last madness I’ll probably persist in is to believe myself a poet: it will be up to the critics to cure me.
Gérard de Nerval
The marvellous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence, we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language.
Michel Foucault
I walked into my own book, seeking peace.It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.
Anaïs Nin
There are those to whom one must advise madness.
Joseph Joubert
There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.
Anaïs Nin
I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.
Charles Baudelaire
Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one...
Anaïs Nin
But in the machine of today we forget that motors are whirring: the motor, finally, has come to fulfill its function, which is to whirr as a heart beats - and we give no thought to the beating of our heart. Thus, precisely because it is perfect the machine dissembles its own existence instead of forcing itself upon our notice.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Perfection is such a nuisance that I often regret having cured myself of using tobacco.
Émile Zola
Human inventions march from thecomplex to the simple, and simplicity is always perfection.
Alexandre Dumas
A technically perfect photograph can be the world's most boring picture.
Andreas Feininger
God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh. But he can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme affliction. This is the only possibility of perfection for us on earth. That is why the Cross is our only hope.
Simone Weil
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
It’s necessary that everyone does his duty and works in his place - devotes himself to constructing a body of fundamental values - against the common enemy - in a network of active, supple, inderdependent, and confederated resistance - present on every front, at the level of Europe - with the aim of concentrating all the energies of the combatants.
Guillaume Faye
I had fought on behalf of man against the sea, but I realised that it had become more urgent to fight on behalf of the sea against men.
Alain Bombard
I love luxury. And luxury lies not in richness and ornateness but in the absence of vulgarity. Vulgarity is the ugliest word in our language. I stay in the game to fight it.
Coco Chanel
If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it.
Michel de Montaigne
Heroes are damned. No mortal conquers Death.
Shan Sa
Concha would cry when she found out I was dead, she should have no taste for life for months afterward. But I was still the one who was going to die. I thought of her soft, beautiful eyes. when she looked at me something passed her to me. But I knew it was over: if she looked at me now the look would stay in her eyes, it wouldn't reach me. I was alone
Jean-Paul Sartre
Everything I see reminds me that in a few days I shall no longer see it... It's horrible... I shall see nothing more... nothing of what exists... the smallest objects that we use... glasses... plates... beds where people sleep so comfortably... carriages. It's so lovely, going out in a carriage, in the evening... How much I enjoyed all that!
Guy de Maupassant
I am not afraid of death. When I have to confront the great reaper, I would like to recall Bernanos' words- 'And now , just the two of us!'.
Jean mercure
They say you fly when you die.Basically, when you die, your spirit leaves your body. Actually, at first you can see all your life, like, reflected in a magic mirror. Then you start floating like a ghost. You can see anything happening around you, you can hear everything, but you can’t communicate with the world of the living.Then you see these lights, all these different lights, of all different colors. These lights are the doors that pull you into other planes of existence, but most people actually like this world so much that they don’t want to be taken away… So the whole thing turns into a bad trip and the only way out is to get reincarnated.It’s funny you know, DMT only lasts for six minutes but it really seems like eternity. It’s the same chemical that your brain receives when you die. It’s a little bit like, dying would be the ultimate trip.
Gaspar Noé
And do you know the story about Haydn’s head? They cut it away from the still-warm cadaver so some insane scientist could take apart the brain and pinpoint the location of musical genius. And the Einstein Story? He’d carefully written his will with instructions to cremate him. They followed his orders, but his disciple, ever loyal and devoted, refused to live without the master’s gaze on him. Before the cremation, he took the eyes of the cadaver and put them in a bottle of alcohol to keep them watching him until the moment he should die himself. That’s why I said that the crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It’s the only absolute death. And I don’t want any other. Jean-Marc, I want an absolute death.
Milan Kundera
Indeed, in the majority of cases the dying person has already lost consciousness. Death had been dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death, the one in which consciousness was lost, or the one in which breathing stopped. All these little silent deaths have replaced and erased the great dramatic act of death, and no one any longer has the strength or patience to wait over a period of weeks for a moment which has lost a part of its meaning.
Philippe Ariès
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.
Philippe Ariès
Too evident sorrow does not inspire pity but repugnance, it is the sign of mental instability or of bad manners: it is morbid.
Philippe Ariès
An acceptable death is a death which can be accepted or tolerated by the survivors. It has its antithesis: ‘the embarrassingly graceless dying,’ which embarrasses the survivors because it causes too strong an emotion to burst forth; and emotions must be avoided both in the hospital and everywhere in society. One does not have the right to become emotional other than in private, that is to say, secretly.
Philippe Ariès
My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.
Marie Antoinette
But you'll see, you can feel time on the wind it whips up as it passes. We don't worry about time or the wind. Nothing can touch us any more. As long as people remember us, we are here. Anyway, it's the wind that tells us, lets us know about the thigs we've left behind.
Tahar ben Jelloun
I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there's nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear. Dying, we may already be dead, but we never die, that moment never comes, or rather it never stops coming, there it is, it's coming, and then it's still coming, and then it's already over, without ever having come.
Jonathan Littell
Wherever you turn, you can find someone who needs you. Even if it is a little thing, do something for which there is no pay but the privilege of doing it. Remember, you don't live in a world all of your own.
Albert Schweitzer
The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.
Georges Bataille