Quotes by French Authors - Page 69

When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium.
Émile Zola
If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
Honoré de Balzac
Fools – in other words most people – imagine that it would be a wonderful achievement to be able to recover our youth; but those who know life are aware how little it would profit us. ("A Woman's Vengeance")
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
Tolerance cannot seduce the young.
Emil M. Cioran
He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.
Michel Houellebecq
There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.
Milan Kundera
I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.
Milan Kundera
Their eyes locked.They could see into each other's souls. This was why she had been born.
Marion Croslydon
It's okay to dream, but remember to plan when you wake up.
G.C. Julien
I have found heaven on earth, since heaven is God, and God is in my soul.
Elizabeth of the Trinity
Truly it is a blessed thing to love on earth as we hope to love in Heaven, and to begin that friendship here which is to endure for ever there.
Francis de Sales
I don't have to worry about Madame Ouche! she'll still be robbing me blind when she's dead!...having made her last confession and received extreme unction...all the cataclysms will pass over her without harming a single gray hair on her head! it's a paradise here for scum like her, on earth as there is in heaven...they don't really die, the sluts, the hussies, the really awful ones, they just go from one paradise to another, with their money, servants, cars...just buy their cute little ticket and off they go! final absolution and see you later! they shit in your hands!...they're born to slip out of both hells - the one here and the one in the next world...all they do is fuck and whine...loads of cash! never broke!...cheers! here's to you! no regrets! you realize too late...
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.
Alphonse de Lamartine
Heaven without love : what a hell. (Paradis sans amour : voilà ce qu'est l'enfer)
Charles de Leusse
For very few persons are concerned about the way that leads to heaven, but all are anxious to know, before the time, what passes there.
John Calvin
Oh, Heidi! Heidi!" Marta exclaimed at last. "This is your garden. I know it even though you have not told me. Do you suppose in Heaven it is any more beautiful than this?""I sometimes think that Heaven is all around us, if we only have eyes to see it," Heidi said softly."And on the Alm too?" questioned Marta."Yes, and in Dorfli. Even in the chateau which seems so gloomy now. There must be a little Heaven there as well. And if not, Marta, why not make it so?
Charles Tritten
Why put yourself in charge of Heaven's cause?Does Heaven need our help to enforce its laws?
Molière
He did not seek to efface pain in forgetfulness, he sought to elevate it and to dignify it with hope. He would say, "Be careful how you turn to the dead. Don't think of the rotting. Hold your gaze and you will see the living light of your dearly loved departed up above in heaven.
Victor Hugo
Paradise does not exist, but we must nonetheless strive to be worthy of it.
Jules Renard
Not one idiot in a thousand has been entirely refractory to treatment, not one in a hundred has not been made more happy and healthy; more than thirty per cent have been taught to conform to social and moral law, and rendered capable of order, of good feeling, and of working like the third of a man; more than forty per cent have become capable of the ordinary transactions of life under friendly control, of understanding moral and social abstractions, of working like two-thirds of a man.
Edouard Séguin
And since he was seeing more and more people who were unhappy for no apparent reason, he was becoming more and more tired, and even a little unhappy himself. He began to wonder if he was in the right profession, whether he was happy with life, whether he wasn't missing out on something. And then he felt very afraid because he wondered whether these unhappy people were contagious.
François Lelord
Happy! who can answer for that? Happiness or unhappiness is the secret known but to oneself…
Alexandre Dumas
He looked at Hector's list and told him that, thanks to a lot of studies and calculations, they'd shown that if you compared yourself to others and didn't find yourself wanting, if you had no money or health problems, if you had friends, a close-knit family, a job you liked, if you were religious and practised your religion, if you felt useful, if you went for a little stroll from time to time, and all of this in a country that was run by not very bad people, where you were taken care of when things went wrong, your chances of bring happy were greatly increased.
François Lelord
Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas.It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
Charles Baudelaire
For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.
Albert Camus
We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is linked to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.
Emil M. Cioran
If you come at four in the afternoon, I'll begin to be happy by three.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The child is more individualised than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent. In each case, it is towards the first of these pairs that all the individualising mechanisms are turned in our civilisation and when one wishes to individualise the healthy, normal and law-abiding adult, it is always by asking him how much of the child he has in him, what secret madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt of committing
Michel Foucault
You ask: Why is the malady of death fatal? She answers: Because whoever has it doesn't know he's a carrier, of death. And also because he's like to die without any life to die to, and without evn knowing that's what he's doing.
Marguerite Duras
My attraction to drugs is based on an immense desire to annihilate awareness.
Anaïs Nin
Conscious living allows us to become the composers and conductors of our lives.
Serge Mazerand
That is the definition of truth, it is the thing you must not say. “The miracle into which the child and the poet walk” [Tsvetaeva] as if walking home, and home is there…The thing that is both known and unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. Kafka says—one very small line lost in his writing—“to the depths, to the depths.
Hélène Cixous
It's never too late to come home," he said, and pulled me gently, insistently toward him."All you have to do...is stop moving away.
Joanne Harris
It is to the prodigals...that the memory of their Father's house comes back. If the son had lived economically he would never have thought of returning.
Simone Weil
From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes 'responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.' It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, 'the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?
Albert Camus
For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.
Gaston Bachelard
I let it go. It's like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.
Joanne Harris
I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
Jean Cocteau
The poet Mallarmé listened to the painter Degas complaining about his inability to write poems even though “he was full of ideas.” “My dear Degas,” Mallarmé responded, “poems are not made out of ideas. They’re made out of words.
Stéphane Mallarmé
The mere ambition to write a poem is enough to kill it.
Henri Michaux
Latefor the present, I supposeaccentuated each timeyou see, quick enoughthis fraction of earthunderfootthat upright speechimprints,like the whole of beingresumesWe’ve hit on something like lightning strikes
Deborah Heissler
Silence. First it’s a cloud of apricot trees in flower, yellow or ivory, like a thousand little butterflies sown in the fresh grass, moving in the glow of lamplight when night ascends. Fragments of dreams. You can see the red sun setting on the foliage, like an enormous mass of incandescent steel.Then there were the trees a little farther off, straightening their fragile frames, the woolen blue pincushion flower like an eye and that tumult of milk in the deep stone, and finally the moan of the air beaten by a flock of blue woodpigeons– a silken challenge perhaps, or one of crackled leather.
Deborah Heissler
And thenwe no longer distinguish far nor nearThey sleepdreamgather branchesfor this firethe cloud brewsagainst the powerless day —Long line of fugitivesbeneath the snow
Deborah Heissler
Everything had become song. The curve of the road beneath the clouds here, and there the strokes of dark earth, the green and the gray, the torn pink of clay and gravel under fingertips. The consonance was above all that of the muffled shadow and grass to the depths of sky, where a flutter of cheerful feathers quivered.In these dreams there are also black walnut trees, and then a forest that opens in a breeze. Nothing. Nothing more than the obstinate sound of wind.
Deborah Heissler
Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much
Blaise Pascal
Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list.
Nicolas Chamfort
In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'episteme' that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.
Michel Foucault
In that pallid and sullen shadow in which he crawled, whenever he turned his head and endeavoured to raise his eyes, he saw, with mingled rage and terror, forming, massing, and mounting up out of sight above him with horrid escarpments, a kind of frightful accumulation of things, of laws, of prejudices, of men, and of acts, the outlines of which escaped him, the weight of which appalled him, and which was no other than that prodigious pyramid that we call civilization.
Victor Hugo
An opportunity fordoing an injury happens a hundred times a day, hut for doing good not once a year," says Zoroaster.
Voltaire
I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless.
Albert Camus
The Lord enjoins us to do good to all without exception, though the greater part, if estimated by their own merit, are most unworthy of it. But Scripture subjoins a most excellent reason, when it tells us that we are not to look to what men in themselves deserve, but to attend to the image of God, which exists in all, and to which we owe all honor and love. But in those who are of the household of faith, the same rule is to be more carefully observed, inasmuch as that image is renewed and restored in them by the Spirit of Christ. Therefore, whoever be the man that is presented to you as needing your assistance, you have no ground for declining to give it to him. Say he is a stranger. The Lord has given him a mark which ought to be familiar to you: for which reason he forbids you to despise your own flesh (Gal. 6:10). Say he is mean and of no consideration. The Lord points him out as one whom he has distinguished by the luster of his own image (Isaiah 58:7). Say that you are bound to him by no ties of duty. The Lord has substituted him as it were into his own place, that in him you may recognize the many great obligations under which the Lord has laid you to himself. Say that he is unworthy of your least exertion on his account; but the image of God, by which he is recommended to you, is worthy of yourself and all your exertions. But if he not only merits no good, but has provoked you by injury and mischief, still this is no good reason why you should not embrace him in love, and visit him with offices of love. He has deserved very differently from me, you will say. But what has the Lord deserved? Whatever injury he has done you, when he enjoins you to forgive him, he certainly means that it should be imputed to himself. In this way only we attain to what is not to say difficult but altogether against nature, to love those that hate us, render good for evil, and blessing for cursing, remembering that we are not to reflect on the wickedness of men, but look to the image of God in them, an image which, covering and obliterating their faults, should by its beauty and dignity allure us to love and embrace them.
John Calvin
Only god has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us
Emil M. Cioran
There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.
Albert Camus
I'm afraid to go into myself and see what's going on in there.
Muriel Barbery
Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
Voltaire
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind usis a part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another
Anatole France
Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small minded.Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas,—this is the very struggle of progress.
Victor Hugo
the greater number of a man's errors come before him disguised under the specious form of necessity; then, after error has been committed in a moment of excitement, of delirium, or of fear, we see that we might have avoided and escaped it.
Alexandre Dumas
It appears, from all this, that our eyes are uncertain. Two persons look at the same clock and there is a difference of two or three minutes in their reading of the time. One has a tendency to put back the hands, the other to advance them. Let us not too confidently try to play the part of the third person who wishes to set the first two aright; it may well happen that we are mistaken in turn. Besides, in our daily life, we have less need of certainty than of a certain approximation to certainty. Let us learn how to see, but without looking too closely at things and men: they look better from a distance.
Rémy de Gourmont
As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.
Rémy de Gourmont