Quotes by French Authors - Page 60

While some people are good at painting, playing an instrument or singing, I have been told more than once I am good at storytelling. I hope that you enjoy my stories as I recall them.
Eric Arrouze
I’d very much like to ‘conclude' something from this experiment. Or that it should raise a question in my mind, and a commitment to get to the bottom of the matter, to investigate, to come up with an outline of the beginning of an answer, however ill-defined or trite it might be . . . But no. I’m here to see, hear, observe - to experience. Let others explain.
Jacques Yonnet
A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.
Guy Sajer
Oh my!! How you've grown. Soon you'll be catching the Lord's balls.
Marjane Satrapi
In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!
Marjane Satrapi
You are putting yourself in serious danger...'I think that I preferred to put myself in serious danger rather than confront my shame. My shame at not having become someone, the shame of not having made my parents proud after all the sacrifices they had made for me. The shame of having become a mediocre nihilist.
Marjane Satrapi
A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.
Jean Rostand
Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. (...) One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.
Emil M. Cioran
People pretend not to like grapes when the vines are too high for them to reach.
Marguerite de Navarre
I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.
Voltaire
One day of happiness is worth more than a lifetime of sorrow .... Under ordinary circumstances, jealousy is a suspicion to the person who excites it and degrading to the person who indulges it.
Victor Hugo
I have never experienced a sorrow that was not relieved by an hour of reading.
Daniel Pennac
Sorrow is allowed, sorrow is advised; all we have to do is let go, all we have to do is love.
Grégoire Delacourt
He wondered why he wasn't as in love with her as he was with...Hector had only shared enjoyment with (her)...he shared everything, enjoyment and sorrow...but for some time now they'd shared too much frustration, boredom and fatigue.
François Lelord
I wanted to cry, but the tears did not come.
Tatiana de Rosnay
I am alone. I am here. No one is watching me. In these hours of silence that I cherish, I talk to myself and reflect. That past, entrenched in time, motionless and infinite, has vanished onto thin air. None of it remains. Why, therefore, am I hurting so much? Why did I bring back with me this nameless pain? I followed the path I set for myself, and I have forgiven. I do not want to be chained to hatred or resentment. I want to have the right to live in peace.
Ingrid Betancourt
I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.
Anaïs Nin
A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.
Françoise Sagan
I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.
Victor Hugo
But I can’t manage to grow up and change shape. I’m still tiny, and staying that way, perhaps because I know the secret that everyone pretends to be unaware of, perhaps because I know that deep down we’re all tiny.
Delphine de Vigan
Adults tend to repress their pleasure. Sad to say, I think we become adults only through disappointment, grief, and lies. So of course gradually we become tough, less sensitive.
Jean-Louis Gassee
Accursed! Accursed! You shall be accursed to the thirteenth generation!
Maurice Druon
I love you" begins by I, but it ends up by you. ("Je t'aime" commence par Je, - Mais il finit par toi.)
Charles de Leusse
When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong--or absolutely right.
Albert Guinon
I have seen human beings who have forged "intellectual" armor to shield themselves from adversity. They seemed stronger than most. They said, "I couldn't care less," and laughed at everything, but when adversity managed to pierce their armor, it caused terrible damage.I have seen human beings suffer from the slightest adversity, the slightest annoyance, but still remain open-minded and sensitive to everything, learning something from each attack.
Bernard Werber
He was fond of saying, "There is a bravery of the priest as well as the bravery of a colonel of dragoons,--only," he added, "ours must be tranquil.
Victor Hugo
And if not for the caterpillars and butterflies, who will I talk to? You'll be far away. And as for larger creatures, I'm not afraid. I have my thorns...to protect me.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Then Chameroy spoke. 'You always put the blame on opium, but as I see it the case of Freneuse is much more complicated. Him, an invalid? No - a character from the tales of Hoffmann! Have you never taken the trouble to look at him carefully? That pallor of decay; the twitching of his bony hands, more Japanese than chrysanthemums; the arabesque profile; that vampiric emaciation - has all of that never given you cause to reflect? In spite of his supple body and his callow face Freneuse is a hundred thousand years old. That man has lived before, in ancient times under the reigns of Heliogabalus, Alexander IV and the last of the Valois. What am I saying? That man is Henri III himself. I have in my library an edition of Ronsard - a rare edition, bound in pigskin with metal trimmings - which contains a portrait of Henri engraved on vellum. One of these nights I will bring the volume here to show you, and you may judge for yourselves. Apart from the ruff, the doublet and the earrings, you would believe that you were looking at the Due de Freneuse. As far as I'm concerned, his presence here inevitably makes me ill - and so long as he is present, there is such an oppression, such a heaviness...
Jean Lorrain
The famous courtesan Clarimonde died recently, as the result of an orgy which lasted eight days and eight nights. It was something infernally magnificent. They revived the abominations of the feasts of Belshazzar and Cleopatra. Great God! what an age this is in which we live! The guests were served by swarthy slaves speaking an unknown tongue, who to my mind had every appearance of veritable demons; the livery of the meanest among them might have served as a gala-costume for an emperor. There have always been current some very strange stories concerning this Clarimonde, and all her lovers have come to a miserable or a violent end. It has been said that she was a ghoul, a female vampire; but I believe that she was Beelzebub in person.
Théophile Gautier
For, like desire, regret seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied. When one begins to love, one spends one’s time, not in getting to know what one’s love really is, but in making it possible to meet next day. When one abandons love one seeks not to know one’s grief but to offer to her who is causing it that expression of it which seems to one the most moving. One says the things which one feels the need of saying, and which the other will not understand, one speaks for oneself alone. I wrote: 'I had thought that it would not be possible. Alas, I see now that it is not so difficult.' I said also: 'I shall probably not see you again;' I said it while I continued to avoid shewing a coldness which she might think affected, and the words, as I wrote them, made me weep because I felt that they expressed not what I should have liked to believe but what was probably going to happen.
Marcel Proust
This is one of those rare moments when, while doing that which it is one's duty to do, one feels something which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from proceeding further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience, though satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated with a pain at the heart.
Victor Hugo
Every damn fool thing you do in this life you pay for.
Édith Piaf
I've lived the life of a man without teeth, he thought about it. A life of a man without teeth. I've never bitten, I've been waiting, keeping myself for later - and now I've just ascertained that I don't have teeth anymore.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I don’t pretend to know much about love, but that’s how great love comes to an end, not in the flames of passion, but in the silence of regret.
Joanne Harris
Let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!
Albert Camus
There will always remain more ashes than remorse.
Hubert Haddad
Some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her.
Gustave Flaubert
The tragedy of Dionysus: Wear a black robe at night, and white you’ll wear by morning; but wear a purple robe to the midnight feast, and when you wake you’ll dress in black to mourn your soul deceased.
Roman Payne
The way a man drinks in company tells you nothing about him, but the way he drinks when alone reveals, without his realizing it, the very depths of his soul.
Irène Némirovsky
Above the sky, everything is beautiful, but alone. (Au-dessus du ciel, - Tout est beau, mais seul)
Charles de Leusse
We knit alone our life, before seeing by it our shroud. (Nous tricotons notre vie seule, Avant d'y voir notre linceul)
Charles de Leusse
Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?
Jean-Paul Sartre
When he was younger, he used the slightest opportunity to slip away from people, without his being able to understand very clearly why he did so: a longing to break free and to breathe in the fresh air?
Patrick Modiano
the comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation
Marcel Proust
The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.
Albert Camus
Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored.
Victor Hugo
The earth is neither fabulous nor paradisal. And therefore it is not hell.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
The real hell of life is everyone has his reasons.
Jean Renoir
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
Victor Hugo
Our true wisdom is to embrace with meek docility, and without reservation, whatever the holy scriptures have delivered.
John Calvin
We should consider that the brightness of the Divine countenance, which even an apostle declares to be inaccessible, (1Ti 6: 16) is a kind of labyrinth — a labyrinth to us inextricable, if the Word do not serve us as a thread to guide our path; and that it is better to limp in the way, than run with the greatest swiftness out of it.
John Calvin
I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.
Igor Stravinsky
True knowledge of God is born out of obedience.
John Calvin
But the Lord often leaves his servants, not only to be annoyed by the violence of the wicked, but to be lacerated and destroyed; allows the good to languish in obscurity and squalid poverty, while the ungodly shine forth, as it were, among the stars; and even by withdrawing the light of his countenance does not leave them lasting joy. Wherefore, David by no means disguises the fact, that if believers fix their eyes on the present condition of the world, they will be grievously tempted to believe that with God integrity has neither favour nor reward; so much does impiety prosper and flourish, while the godly are oppressed with ignominy, poverty, contempt, and every kind of cross. The Psalmist says, "But as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh slipped. For I was envious of the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked." At length, after a statement of the case, he concludes, "When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me: until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end," (Ps. 73:2, 3, 16, 17).
John Calvin
Why shouldn't a mystical theology be possible? 'I want to touch God or become God,' I declared in my journal. All through that year I abandoned myself intermittently to these deliriums.
Simone de Beauvoir
Is it faith to understand nothing, and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church?
John Calvin
How do you know yourself to be a son of God in fact as well as in name?”Answer: “Because I am baptized in the name of God the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” - John Calvin (from his catechism)
John Calvin
Talk to Me. For Me there is no sweeter prayer.
Gabrielle Bossis
Help!"This was my last cry. My mouth filled with water, I struggled against being drawn the abyss. Suddenly my clothes were seized by a strong hand, and I felt myself quickly drawn up to the surface of the sea; and I heard, yes, I heard these words pronounced in my ear:"If master would be so good as to lean on my shoulder, master would swim with much greater ease."I seized with one hand my faithful Conseil's arm. "Is it you?" said I, "you?""Myself," answered Conseil; "and waiting master's orders.""That shock threw you as well as me in the sea?""No; but, being in my master's service, I followed him."The worthy fellow thought that was but natural.
Jules Verne
And I know, too, that recognizing one's mistakes does not erase them.
Susie Morgenstern