Quotes by French Authors - Page 59

At the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of Heaven fills those who are quitting the light of Earth.
Victor Hugo
I had rather mistrust my own capacity than God's justice.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Never go into venture capital if you want a peaceful life.
Georges F. Doriot
A funny person is funny only for so long, but a wit can sit down and go on being spellbinding forever. One is not meant to laugh. One stays quiet and marvels. Spontaneously witty talk is without question the most fascinating entertainment there is.
Diana Vreeland
The Prince stood beside the timpanist to count his rests for him and see that he came in in the right place. I suppressed all the trumpet passages which were clearly beyond the players' grasp. The solitary trombone was left to his own devices; but as he wisely confined himself to the notes with which he was thoroughly familiar, such as A flat, D and F, and was careful to avoid all others, his success in the role was almost entirely a silent one.
Hector Berlioz
Here comes Mamma Vauquerr, fair as a starrr; and strung up like a bunch of carrots. Aren't we suffocating ourselves a wee bit?' he asked, placing a hand on the top of her corset. 'A bit of a crush in the vestibule, here, Mamma! If we start crying, there'll be an explosion. Never mind, I'll be there to collect the bits--just like an antiquary.''Now, there's the language of true French gallantry,' murmured Madame Vauquer in an aside to Madame Couture.
Honoré de Balzac
A kitten is the delight of a household. All day long a comedy is played out by an incomparable actor.
Champfleury
There is always only one question in the ethics of truth: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being?
Alain Badiou
Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
It is now an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: 'Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds you perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you.
Alain Badiou
In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted
Milan Kundera
It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. (...) The "Tell the truth!" imperative drummed into us so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman.
Milan Kundera
whether they knew of didn't know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. (...) by beating himself on the chest and proclaiming, "My conscience is clear! I did not know! I was a believer!" Isn't his "I did not know I was a believer!" at the very root of his irreparable guilt?
Milan Kundera
At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.
Simone de Beauvoir
If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong t
Albert Camus
The thinking (person) must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another.
Albert Schweitzer
The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another, even the lowliest creature; but to do so is to renounce our manhood and shoulder a guilt which nothing justifies.
Albert Schweitzer
Wine gives one 'ideas,' whereas champagne gives one 'strategies.
Roman Payne
What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths?
Victor Hugo
Has it ever happened to you," Léon went on, "to come across some vague idea of one's own in a book, some dim image that comes to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?
Gustave Flaubert
...for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.
Marcel Proust
The beauty of images lies behind things, the beauty of ideas in front of them.
Marcel Proust
Ideas are substitutes for sorrows...
Marcel Proust
Vincent had ten major ideas every week: three brilliant, five good, and two ridiculous.
Jean-Dominique Bauby
I have no ideas, myself! Not a one! there's nothing more vulgar, more common, more disgusting than ideas! libraries are loaded with them! and every sidewalk cafe!...the impotent are bloated with ideas!...they dazzle youth with ideas! they play the pimp!...and youth is ever ready, as you know, Professor, to gobble up anything, to go OOH! and AAH! by the numbers! How those pimps have an easy job of it! the passionate years of youth are spent getting a hard on and gargling ideeaas!...philosophies, if you prefer!...yes sir, philosophies! youth loves sham just as young dogs love those sticks, like bones, that we throw and they run after! they race forward, yipping away, wasting their time, that's the main thing!
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Si l'on n'est plus que mille, eh bien, j'en suis ! Si mêmeIls ne sont plus que cent, je brave encor Sylla ;S'il en demeure dix, je serai le dixième ;Et s'il n'en reste qu'un, je serai celui-là !(If we're just a thousand, then, here I am! Even ifThey're just a hundred, still I face Sylla;If ten still stand, I'll be the tenth;And if there is only one left, I'll be this one!)
Victor Hugo
Very often, gleams of light come in a few minutes' sleeplessness, in a secondperhaps; you must fix them. To entrust them to the relaxed brain is like writing on water; there is every chance that on the morrow there will be no slightest trace left of any happening.
Antonin Sertillanges
For at the heart of the uniform, reasoning is shaky and elusive: a mind in search of ideas should first stock up on appearances.
Francis Ponge
There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.
Albert Camus
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
You see man we are just fucking extras!! Extras in a capitalist blockbuster!~page 75
Winshluss
Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.
Paul Lafargue
In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!
Paul Lafargue
Hunger justifies the middle classes.
Julien Torma
In the perfect Capitalist State there would be no food available for the non-owner save when he was actually engaged in Production, and that absurdity would, by quickly ending all human lives save those of the owners, put a term to the arrangement.
Hilaire Belloc
These diverse effects of slavery and freedom are easily understood: … the men in Kentucky [neither] have zeal nor enlightenment … cross over into Ohio in order to utilize their industry and to be able to exercise it without shame … in Kentucky, masters make slaves work without being obliged to pay them, but they receive little fruit from their efforts, while the money that they would give to free workers would be recovered with interest from the value of their labors.
Alexis de Tocqueville
One who criticises capitalism while approving of immigration, of which the working class is its first victim, would do better to remain silent. One who criticises immigration while remaining silent regarding capitalism should do the same.
Alain de Benoist
Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity
Guy Debord
Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.
Thomas Piketty
This dog is mine," said those poor children; "that is my place in the sun." Here is the beginning and the image of the usurpation of all the earth.
Blaise Pascal
The purchaser draws boundaries, fences himself in, and says, “This is mine; each one by himself, each one for himself.” Here, then, is a piece of land upon which, henceforth, no one has a right to step, save the proprietor and his friends; which can benefit nobody, save the proprietor and his servants. Let these sales multiply, and soon the people — who have been neither able nor willing to sell, and who have received none of the proceeds of the sale — will have nowhere to rest, no place of shelter, no ground to till. They will die of hunger at the proprietor’s door, on the edge of that property which was their birthright; and the proprietor, watching them die, will exclaim, “So perish idlers and vagrants!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
I remember a time when a cabbage could sell itself by being a cabbage. Nowadays it’s no good being a cabbage – unless you have an agent and pay him a commission. Nothing is free anymore to sell itself or give itself away. These days, Countess, every cabbage has its pimp.
Jean Giraudoux
A good artist should laugh often!
François Place
I would like to paint the way a bird sings.
Claude Monet
From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.
Henri Matisse
Cubism is a Cathedral of shit.
Francis Picabia
When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water. Well, I've tried to express just that. If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirits.
Constantin Brancusi
You sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in spite of it, out of anything, any material given to him. The torments and hells of [crazy men], are not for you.
Anaïs Nin
There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.
Edouard Manet
I am a victim. To be an artist is to be a victim, because if you don't do what you want to do you die. That is the reality.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
It is a matter of artistic instinct. In his own thoughts and feelings and way of doing things an actor is worth nothing or he is worth something. If he is worth something then he will try to be worth something more as is only normal in anyone who wants to get on. I can think of no other way to explain artistic development.
Maurice Chevalier
For an artist, there's nothing better than having the opportunity to create a world that doesn't- but could- exist.
Christophe Lautrette
The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.
Henri Matisse
The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.
Guy de Maupassant
For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
You leave behind your fine poems.You leave behind your beautiful flowers. And the earth that was only leant to you. You ascend into the Light, O Quechomitl, you leave behind the flowers and the singing and the earth. Safe journey, O friend.
Aliette de Bodard
Horse[Man you will find herea new representation of the universeat its most poetic and most modernMan man man man man manGive yourself up to this art where the sublimedoes not exclude charmand brilliancy does not blur the nuanceit is now or never the momentto be sensitive to poetry for it dominatesall dreadfullyGuillaume Apollinaire]
Guillaume Apollinaire
[poems are] crystals deposited after the effervescent contact of the spirit with reality.(cristaux deposes apres l'effervescent contact de l'esprit avec la realite)
Pierre Reverdy
True poetry is embarrassing.
Julien Torma