Quotes by French Authors - Page 63

A kiss! When all is said, what is a kiss? An oath of allegiance taken in closer proximity, a promise more precise, a seal on a confession, a rose-red dot upon the letter i in loving; a secret which elects the mouth for ear; an instant of eternity murmuring like a bee; balmy communion with a flavor of flowers; a fashion of inhaling each other's hearts, and of tasting, on the brink of the lips, each other's soul!
Edmond Rostand
Frames 221 to 223: The motorcade is now in front of the camera lens, moving ever so slowly. The President and First Lady are waving to the crowd. The President almost stands up to send kisses to a few ladies in the front rows, but the First Lady holds him by the arm. The President sits back comfortably in his Lincoln. He is enjoying himself terribly.
Francis Barel
Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.
Marcel Proust
And yetto wine, to opium even, I preferthe elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;and in the wasteland of desireyour eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.
Charles Baudelaire
A letter to the beloved is like the ink kissing the paper. (Une lettre à l'aimée, c'est - L'encre embrassant le papier)
Charles de Leusse
The kiss is neither returned nor exchanged, because it's free. (Le baiser n'est ni repris - Ni échangé, car gratuit.)
Charles de Leusse
A kiss is the morning dew which stand up. (Un baiser, c'est la rosée - Du matin qui s'est levé)
Charles de Leusse
... the kiss, the bodily surrender which would seem natural and but moderately attractive...
Marcel Proust
We write "I love you" on the mouth by the kisses that touch it. (On écrit "je t'aime" sur bouche - Par les bisous qui la touchent.)
Charles de Leusse
Charles went to kiss her shoulder.-Leave me alone! she said, you're creasing my dress.
Gustave Flaubert
I had kissed her at odd times, in out of the way corners, in the manner of a mountain guide, nothing more.
Guy de Maupassant
How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.
Victor Hugo
A kiss, when all is told, what is it? An oath taken a little closer, a promise more exact. A wish that longs to be confirmed, a rosy circle drawn around the verb 'to love'. A kiss is a secret which takes the lips for the ear, a moment of infinity humming like a bee, a communion tasting of flowers, a way of breathing in a little of the heart and tasting a little of the soul with the edge of the lips!
Edmond Rostand
The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.
Guy de Maupassant
Where should one use perfume?" a young woman asked. "Wherever one wants to be kissed.
Coco Chanel
A kiss is a secret which takes the lips for the ear.
Edmond Rostand
For when man is faced with a curse he answers, "I'll take care of my problems." And he puts everything to work to become powerful, to keep the curse from having its effects. He creates the arts and the sciences, he raises an army, he constructs chariots, he builds cities. The spirit of might is a response to the divine curse.
Jacques Ellul
My life will have been a succession of lives, as if I have had several lives, a multiplicity of stories and roles. I have not ceased to have changes of life.
Bernard Stiegler
Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.
Jacques Ellul
In the technological world...it is no longer a question of dominating nature or society in order to be more free or more happy, but of mastery for mastery's sake, of domination for the sake of domination. Why? For no end, precisely, or rather: because it is quite simply impossible to do otherwise, given the nature of societies entirely governed by competition, by the absolute imperative to 'advance or perish'.
Luc Ferry
This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation.
Guy Debord
Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.
Jean Baudrillard
The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself.
Jean Baudrillard
I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural artifacts worthy of their attention and respect.
Bruno Latour
Whatever happens, we have gotThe Maxim gun, and they have not.
Hilaire Belloc
Truly, more than removing the partition between vectors and values, we would have needed to talk about strengthening crisscrossed lacings: an intertwined kind of understanding that would de-ideologize 'ideologies,' desanctify sanctities, but also mentalize the material bases of systems of inscription, and psychoanalyze not souls but tools. That is, in one and the same gesture, make our mnemo-technic equipment intelligible as mentality and our mental equipment intelligible as technology.
Régis Debray
In cities where peace and the arts flourish, men are more consumed by jealousy, worry, and anxiety than they are in cities under the blight of a besieging army. Private sorrows are more bitter than public suffering.
Voltaire
And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her?
Marcel Proust
My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.
Michel de Montaigne
For our anxiety is the one thing we cannot place on the shoulders of others, it suffocates them.
Anaïs Nin
Despair is the state in which anxiety and restlessness are immanent to existence. Nobody in despair suffers from “problems”, but from his own inner torment and fire. It’s a pity that nothing can be solved in this world. Yet there never was and here never will be anyone who would commit suicide for this reason. So much for the power that intellectual anxiety has over the total anxiety of our being! That is why I prefer the dramatic life, consumed by inner fires and tortured by destiny, to the intellectual, caught up in abstractions which do not engage the essence of our subjectivity. I despise the absence of risks, madness and passion in abstract thinking. How fertile live, passionate thinking is! Lyricism feeds it like blood pumped into the heart!
Emil M. Cioran
Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.
Blaise Pascal
you have to live by fighting each other, it's the law, the only way that things areworth while but it hurts
Julio Cortázar
Sometimes survival is the worst alternative there is
Joanne Harris
... the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a supply of fresh meat for her offspring after her own decease, calls in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive cruelty, and, having made a collection of weevils and spiders, proceeds with marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions) depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which her egg is laid, will furnish the larva, when it is hatched, with a tamed and inoffensive quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder...
Marcel Proust
The interior joy we feel when we have done a good deed is the nourishment the soul requires.
Albert Schweitzer
The dream of poor Bazin had always been to serve a man of the cloth.
Alexandre Dumas
We are not called upon to do all the good that is possible, but only that which we can do.
Theodore Guerin
Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love.
Thérèse de Lisieux
He [Eugène Rougon] believed exclusively in himself; where another saw reasons, Rougon possessed convictions; he subordinated everything to the incessant aggrandisement of his own ego. Despite being utterly devoid of real self-indulgence, he nevertheless indulged in secret orgies of supreme power.
Émile Zola
So how did you end up making a fool of yourself in front of twenty thousand people?I had a bigger hole to fill.What do you mean?A rock star is someone with a hole in his heart almost the size of his ego.
Michka Assayas
[Duration is] the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former state.
Henri Bergson
If you do not lend your car, your fountain pen or your wife to anyone, that is because these objects, according to the logic of jealously, are narcissistic equivalents of the ego: to lose them, or for them to be damaged, means castration.
Jean Baudrillard
Very well, young man, very well," Treville went on, "I know those airs. I came to Paris with four ecus in my pocket, and I'd have fought with anybody who told me I was in no condition to buy the Louvre.
Alexandre Dumas
Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.
Victor Hugo
Do not be discouraged by the resistance you will encounter from your human nature; you must go against your human inclinations. Often, in the beginning, you will think that you are wasting time, but you must go on, be determined and persevere in it until death, despite all the difficulties.
Brother Lawrence
You know, most men would get discouraged by now. Fortunately for you, I am not most men!
PePe Le Pew
...remember that what has once been done may be done again.
Alexandre Dumas
That will be so amusing! You will have five hundred million little bells,and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
My star will just be one of the stars, for you. And so you will love to watch all the stars in the heavens...they will all be your friends."-the little prince
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Consider now the Milky Way. Here also we see an innumerable dust, only the grains of this dust are no longer atoms but stars; these grains also move with great velocities, they act at a distance one upon another, but this action is so slight at great distances that their trajectories are rectilineal; nevertheless, from time to time, two of them may come near enough together to be deviated from their course, like a comet that passed too close to Jupiter. In a word, in the eyes of a giant, to whom our Suns were what our atoms are to us, the Milky Way would only look like a bubble of gas.
Henri Poincaré
Supposing I know of a flower that is absolutely unique, that is nowhere to be found except on my planet, and any minute that flower could accidentally be eaten up by a little lamb, isn't that important? If a person loves a flower that is the only one of its kind on all the millions and millions of stars, then gazing at the night sky is enough to make him happy. He says to himself "My flower is out there somewhere." But if the lamb eats the flower, then suddenly it's as if all the stars had stopped shining. Isn't that important?
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Overhead shone the great star of the constellation of Lyra, destined to be the polar star for men who will live tens of thousands of years after we have ceased to be.
Marguerite Yourcenar
If you love a flower which happens to be on a star, it is sweet at night to gaze at the sky. All the stars are a riot of flowers.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I dreamt that I was old. And you – you were beside me.Forever young – in your hand, a cup of stars.
Joanne Harris
You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Everything is alive, everything is in motion, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays that emanate from me or from others flow directly through the infinite chain of creation whose transparent network is in continuous communication with the planets and the stars. A captive here on earth for the moment, I commune with the chorus of stars and they join in my sorrows and joys.
Gérard de Nerval
A few stars were approaching and in their brightness I glimpsed a fragment of your vanished soul – cheerful and frivolous, unforgettable.
Christian Bobin
They rarely discovered a star red as a distant crime or a star-fish.
André Breton
How is it possible for one to own the stars?""To whom do they belong?" the businessman retorted, peevishly."I don't know. To nobody.
Antoine De Saint Exupery