Quotes by French Authors - Page 72

When you’re here, an i in the Ocean, you’re no longer waiting for something to happen or to change. When you’re here you have what you seek. Your heart opens to the gift you receive, that you are.
Jean-Pierre Weill
Laughter aids the digestion. You can eat a huge stew with your schoolmates and digest it with no bother at all, whereas you can get indigestion eating a leaf of lettuce in boring company.
Maurice Mességué
The mold we give to our lives is so that there will be no cataclysms. The order we seek we are willing to surrender to the flow of life at any time, but it is there as a brake on a car, and our health is a brake. We put brakes on, against our temperament. he said, “Even a room, arranged in a certain manner, prevents certain things from taking place in it.
Anaïs Nin
Mr. Orage, one of the most active and intelligent reformers for the last generation in England, attempted this very thing. He, in his little intellectual review which was supported by so brilliant a group of writers for so many years, published week after week the ingredients of the English patent medicines and the cost of those ingredients. Not a single one of the newspapers followed suit, or dared publish so much as the fact that Orage was thus acting courageously in his own limited sphere for the public good.
Hilaire Belloc
I've decided to be happy because it's good for my health.
Voltaire
Water, air, and cleanness are the chief articles in my pharmacy.
Napoléon Bonaparte
I know positively - yes Rieux I can say I know the world inside out as no one on earth is free from it. And I know too that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in careless moment we breathe in somebody's face and fasten the infection on him. What's natural is the microbe. All the rest- health integrity purity if you like - is a product of the human will of vigilance that must never falter. The good man the man who infects hardly anyone is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power a never ending tension of the mind to avoid such lapses. Yes Rieux it's a wearying business being plague-stricken. But it's still more wearying to refuse to be it. That's why everybody in the world today looks so tired everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us who want to get the plague out of their systems feel such desperate weariness a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death.
Albert Camus
Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.
Albert Camus
Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.
Louis Pasteur
Because things are not agreeable," said Jean Valjean, "that is no reason for being unjust towards God.
Victor Hugo
God may seem sometimes to forget for a while, whilst his justice reposes, but there always comes a moment when he remembers.
Alexandre Dumas
God is merciful to all, as he has been to you; he is first a father, then a judge.
Alexandre Dumas
He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out it was the former that had condemned me.
Albert Camus
As he himself said, "I will prove it to you, gentlemen, and i will prove it in two ways. First in the blinding clarity of the facts, and second, in the dim light cast by the mind of his criminal soul.
Albert Camus
One must always be prepared to switch sides with justice, that fugitive of the winning camp.
Simone Weil
And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.
Albert Camus
If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale ... we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of conquerors'.
Simone Weil
. . . for men felt therein the presence of that great human thing which is called law, and that great divine thing which is called justice.
Victor Hugo
Love of justice is for most men only the courage to suffer injustice.
Comte de Lautréamont
In short, whoever does violence to truth or its expression eventually mutilates justice, even though he thinks he is serving it. From this point of view, we shall deny to the very end that a press is true because it is revolutionary; it will be revolutionary only if it is true, and never otherwise.
Albert Camus
Fear follows crime and is its punishment.
Voltaire
I wanted to be JUSTICE, LOVE, and the WRATH OF GOD all in one.
Marjane Satrapi
He had ceased to believe in the efficacy of alms; it was not sufficient that one should be charitable, henceforth one must be just. Given justice, indeed, horrid misery would disappear, and no such thing as charity would be needed.
Émile Zola
Therein lies the new hope—Justice, after eighteen hundred years of impotent Charity. Ah! in a thousand years from now, when Catholicism will be naught but a very ancient superstition of the past, how amazed men will be to think that their ancestors were able to endure that religion of torture and nihility!
Émile Zola
As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Let everything be remade on simple lines. There is only one people, there is only one people!
Henri Barbusse
It is only on the basis of the probable and the apparent that men bereft of a sixth sense are able to sit in judgment over other men.
Petrus Borel
The soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious heaven.
Victor Hugo
It's hard luck always having to be a judge.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Many of those who are humiliated are not humble. Some react to humiliation with anger, others with patience, and others with freedom. The first are culpable, the next harmless, the last just.
Bernard of Clairvaux
Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.
Victor Hugo
I couldn't quite understand how an ordinary man's good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man.
Albert Camus
I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
Albert Camus
It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.
Voltaire
People have seen that I intend to sweep away everything we have been taught to consider - without question - as grace and beauty; but have overlooked my work to substitute a vaster beauty, touching all objects and beings, not excluding the most despised - and because of that, all the more exhilarating.... I would like people to look at my work as an enterprise for the rehabilitation of scorned values, and, in any case, make no mistake, a work of ardent celebration.... I am convinced that any table can be for each of us a landscape as inexhaustible as the whole Andes range... I am struck by the high value, for a man, of a simple permanent fact, like the miserable vista on which the window of his room opens daily, that comes, with the passing of time, to have an important role in his life. I often think that the highest destination at which a work of art can aim is to take on that function in someone's life.
Jean Dubuffet
... the objects which we admire have no absolute value in themselves...
Marcel Proust
Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is political anymore, the word itself is meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any more, and sex loses its determinants. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly any more, and art itself disappears.
Jean Baudrillard
Anyone I love takes away part of my freedom, but in that case it is I who wished it; and there is so much pleasure in loving that one gladly sacrifices something for its sake. Any one who loves me takes away all my freedom. Anyone who admires me (as a writer) threatens to take it away from me. I even fear those who understand me, which is why I spend so much time covering my tracks - both in my private life and in the persona I express through my books. What would have delighted me, had I loved god, is the thought that god gives nothing in return.
Henry de Montherlant
How strange that excision – female circumcision, with several languages using the same term for both kinds of mutilation – of little girls should revolt the westerner but excite no disapproval when it is performed on little boys. Consensus on the point seems absolute. But ask your interlocutor to think about the validity of this surgical procedure, which consists of removing a healthy part of a nonconsenting child’s body on nonmedical grounds – the legal definition of… mutilation.
Michel Onfray
In 1857, Bizet departed for Rome and spent three years there. He studied the landscape, the culture, Italian literature and art. Musically he studied the scores of the great masters. At the end of the first year he was asked to submit a religious work as his required composition. As a self-described atheist, Bizet felt uneasy and hypocritical writing a religious piece. Instead, he submitted a comic opera. Publicly, the committee accepted, acknowledging his musical talent. Privately, the committee conveyed their displeasure. Thus, early in his career, Bizet displayed an independent spirit that would be reflected in innovative ideas in his opera compos
Georges Bizet
(From Boulez, an authorized biography by Joan Peyser)At the chapel door he [a priest associated with a school Boulez attended] asked me if what he had been told was true: that Boulez no longer believed in God. I said it was...
Pierre Boulez
For the first time (but how long will it take us to acknowledge this?) in the history of ideas, a philosopher had dedicated a whole book to the question of atheism. He professed it, demonstrated it, arguing and quoting, sharing his reading and his reflections, and seeking confirmation from his own observations of the everyday world. His title sets it out clearly: Memoir of the Thoughts and Feelings of Jean Meslier; and so does his subtitle: Clear and Evident Demonstrations of the Vanity and Falsity of All the Religions of the World. The book appeared in 1729, after his death. Meslier had spent the greater part of his life working on it. The history of true atheism had begun.
Michel Onfray
I often asked Laplace what he thought of God. He owned that he was an atheist.
Napoléon Bonaparte
. . . In all parts of our globe, fanatics have cut each other's throats, publicly burnt each other, committed without a scruple and even as a duty, the greatest crimes, and shed torrents of blood . . . Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under divers names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty. We find, in all the religions, 'a God of armies,' a 'jealous God,' an 'avenging God,' a 'destroying God,' a 'God,' who is pleased with carnage, and whom his worshippers consider it a duty to serve. Lambs, bulls, children, men, and women, are sacrificed to him. Zealous servants of this barbarous God think themselves obliged even to offer up themselves as a sacrifice to him. Madmen may everywhere be seen, who, after meditating upon their terrible God, imagine that to please him they must inflict on themselves, the most exquisite torments. The gloomy ideas formed of the deity, far from consoling them, have every where disquieted their minds, and prejudiced follies destructive to happiness.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have, nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience.
Michel de Montaigne
To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.
Michel de Montaigne
But to declare his wishes only in some unknown corner of Asia, to choose the most double-dealing and the most superstitious of peoples as followers, and the vilest, most ridiculous, and most roguish working man as representative, to muddle up the message so much that it is impossible to comprehend, to teach it only to a tiny number of individuals while leaving everyone else in the dark, and to punish them for remaining there... Oh, no, Therese, no, no, such atrocities cannot be our guide. I would rather die a thousand times than believe in them. When atheism wants martyrs, let it choose them and my blood is ready.
Marquis de Sade
An atheist is a man who does not believe the existence of a God; now, no one can be certain of the existence of a being whom he does not conceive, and who is said to unite incompatible qualities.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.
Gustave Flaubert
Every situation is of man's making and can only contain what man contains.
Milan Kundera
If Aliosha had come to the conclusion that neither God nor immortality existed, he would immediately have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not only a question of the working classes; it is above all, in its contemporary incarnation, a question of atheism, a question of the tower of Babel, which is constructed without God's help, not to reach to the heavens, but to bring the heavens down to earth.
Albert Camus
An effort was made to spread this new materialist atheism with its Communist consequence "by the sword" (as the metaphor goes), that is, by the invasion of neighboring countries with consequent further massacres and the extension of the area of despotic Soviet control... This armed attempt at expansion was checked by Catholic Poland, the most immediately exposed victim, in what has been called "one of the decisive battles of the world.
Hilaire Belloc
So, my dear fellow, if I don't believe in God, I believe still less in man.
Honoré de Balzac
Our history, especially that of the great religions, Christianity in particular, has given us a "hidden prejudice" in favor of the "beyond" at the expense of the "here and now" and this must be changed.(quoted from The Age of Atheists" by Peter Watson, p 25)
Luc Ferry
All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a knowledge of God.
Voltaire
Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.
Denis Diderot
If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciproc
Voltaire
Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred.
Honoré de Balzac
Of necessity she went further in aversion than she had gone in love, for her hatred was not in proportion to her love but to her disappointed hopes.
Honoré de Balzac
Durability is one of the chief elements of strength. Nothing is either loved or feared but that which is likely to endure.
Alexis de Tocqueville