Quotes by French Authors - Page 75

Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what dictates the choice nor why, among the millions of human beings we might be, it is the being we were the day before that we unerringly grasp.
Marcel Proust
What a man finds circa se or sub se is overwhelming in amount, what he finds in se is embarassing in its obscurity, but when from his own being he would obtain light as to what is supra se, then indeed he finds himself face to face with a dark and somewhat terrifying mystery. The trouble is that he is himself involved in the mystery. If, in any true sense, man is an image of God, how should he know himself without knowing God? But if it is really of God that he is an image, how should he know himself?
Étienne Gilson
She already loved me too much to see me as I was.
André Gide
This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all thoselikewise that have been attributed to it, this up bringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. Socrates' "Know thyself" has as much value as the "Be virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate.
Albert Camus
The method of addition is quite charming if it involves adding to the self such things as a cat, a dog, roast pork, love of the sea or of cold showers. But the matter becomes less idyllic if a person decides to add love for communism, for the homeland, for Mussolini, for Roman Catholicism or atheism, for fascism or anti-fascism. In both cases the method remains exactly the same: a person stubbornly defending the superiority of cats over other animals is doing basically the same thing as one who maintains that Mussolini was the sole saviour of Italy: he is proud of this attribute of the self and he tries to make this attribute (a cat or Mussolini) acknowledged and loved by everyone.Here is that strange paradox to which all people cultivating the self by way of the addition method are subject: they use addition in order to create a unique, inimitable self, yet because they automatically become propagandists for the added attributes, they are actually doing everything in their power to make as many others as possible similar to themselves; as a result, their uniqueness (so painfully gained) quickly begins to disappear.
Milan Kundera
This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that itexists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest isconstruction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothingbut water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all thoselikewise that have been attributed to it, this up bringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility orthis vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable tome. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap willnever be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.Socrates' "Know thyself" has as much value as the "Be virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia atthe same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in preciselyso far as they are approximate.
Albert Camus
When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by then, having already signed on to the contract to forget, he no longer remembered what he had said to F. three years before. Too bad for him. The memory might have alerted him, might have helped him see that his choice of medicine was wholly theoretical, made without the slightest self- knowledge. Thus he studied medicine for three years before giving up with a sense of shipwreck. What to choose after those lost years? What to attach to, if his inner self should keep as silent as it had before? He walked down the broad outside staircase of the medical school for the last time, with the feeling that he was about to find himself alone on a platform all the trains had left.
Milan Kundera
I no more believe in simplistic solutions than I do in simplistic identieties. The world is a complex machine that can't be dismantled with a srewdriver. But that shouldn't prevent us from observing, from trying to understand, from discussing, and sometimes suggesting a subject for reflection.
Amin Maalouf
It was no shock to me that my parents, like so many others, emerged out of a kind of fog. My father, an unrepentant chatterbox, claimed that his father his father had gone to dig for gold in Paramaribo, Dutch Guyana, anbodoning his mother, who was breast-feeding her baby on the Morne à Cayes. Other times he claimed his father was a merchant seaman, shipwrecked off the coast of Sumatra. Where did the truth lie? I think he re-created it at will, taking pleasure in enunciating the syllables that made him dream: Paramaribo, Sumatra. Thanks to him, from a very early age I understood that you forge an identity.
Maryse Condé
For a majority of women it remains difficult to reconcile increasingly burdensome maternal responsibilities with personal fulfillment.
Élisabeth Badinter
Without asking her permission, someone is trying to intrude her life, draw her attention, in short, to bother her.
Milan Kundera
Motherhood is still the great unknown. For some, it brings incomparable happiness and enriches their identity. Others manage as best they can to reconcile contradictory demands.
Élisabeth Badinter
Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura's method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more visible, perceivable, seizable, sizeable, she keeps adding to it more and more attributes and she attempts to identify herself with them (with the risk that the essence of the self may be buried by the additional attributes).
Milan Kundera
Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.
Milan Kundera
I am the other.
Gérard de Nerval
The gaze of others is quite without indulgence for our defects and that of Mantegna is pitiless. I am grateful to him. Harshness, in the realm of the arts, is a virtue, and it is sometimes a good thing to see oneself as one is. My stupor, however, comes from the fact that people recognise me where I myself seem to see a stranger. This leads one to meditate more deeply on the matter. Are they dwelling on my superficial appearance rather than on what I really am? Who can say?
Marie Ferranti
He thought: that's certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That's how it happens that one fine day a person joins the tramps and turns into one of them.
Milan Kundera
In her dream each of the people assembled around her looked like several others, whom she recognized, only they weren't gradually transformed from one into the other but each of them seemed to be inside the others simultaneously and one of them shone through another. And something else was inside them as well, something unexplainable which wasn't within any of them, whose sum total they appeared to be, and this was what fascinated her above all.
Věra Linhartová
What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
Paul Valéry
Taking the line of least resistance, we lump the most different people together under the same heading. Taking the line of least resistance, we ascribe to them collective crimes, collective acts and opinions. "The Serbs have massacred…", "The English have devastated…", "The Jews have confiscated…", "The Blacks have torched", "The Arabs refuse…". We blithely express sweeping judgments on whole peoples, calling them "hardworking" and "ingenious", or "lazy", "touchy", "sly", "proud", or "obstinate". And sometimes this ends in bloodshed." – Amin Maalouf "On Identity
Amin Maalouf
To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry.If a man who speaks pidgin to a man of color or an Arab does not see anything wrong or evil in such behavior, it is because he has never stopped to think.
Frantz Fanon
I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.
André Breton
Tell me who loves, who admires you, and I will tell you who you are.
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve
In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.
Muriel Barbery
To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place -- an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City...a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.
Michel de Certeau
Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances, and sometimes these loyalties conflict with one another and confront the person who harbors them with difficult choices
Amin Maalouf
But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.
Roland Barthes
Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.
Jean Baudrillard
He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.
Gustave Flaubert
I finally understood what my grandmother meant. If I wasn't comfortable with myself, I would never be comfortable.
Marjane Satrapi
As we know life in ourselves we want to understand life in the universe in order to enter into harmony with it.
Albert Schweitzer
Dictionary: The universe in alphabetical order.
Anatole France
Life is worth more than man will ever know. Each of our choices open up the possibility of a different world. Every time we wake up, the universe puts itself in our hands. So many paths. So many choices. Our discernment is the only way to tell which one leads to happiness.
Thierry Cohen
...the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity—that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. Now, this is basically incompatible with virtually all the religious or metaphysical systems whatever, all of which try to show that there is some sort of harmony between man and the universe and that man is a product—predictable if not indispensable—of the evolution of the universe.
Jacques Monod
Primary causes are unknown to us; but are subject to simple and constant laws, which may be discovered by observation, the study of them being the object of natural philosophy.Heat, like gravity, penetrates every substance of the universe, its rays occupy all parts of space. The object of our work is to set forth the mathematical laws which this element obeys. The theory of heat will hereafter form one of the most important branches of general physics.
Joseph Fourier
The Smile of a Child enlarge the universe (D'un enfant le sourire - Agrandit l'univers)
Charles de Leusse
The sum of the particular intentions of God is the universe itself.
Simone Weil
The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages.
Cyrano de Bergerac
A clock that is moving through space at a very fast speed does not tick at the same rate as a slow-moving watch gently attached to your wrist as you stroll on a tropical beach. The idea of a universal time - a godlike clock that could somehow sit outside our universe and measure, in one go, the movement of everything in it, how its evolution unfolds, how old it is and all that - does not exist.
Christophe Galfard
Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
[They] pervert the course of nature [by saying] the sun does not move and that it is the earth that revolves and that it turns.[John Calvin illustrating his opposition to heliocentrism in a sermon due to the Bible's support of geocentrism]
John Calvin
The difference between us and the papists is that they do not think that the church can be 'the pillar of the truth' unless she presides over the word of God. We, on the other hand, assert that it is because she reverently subjects herself to the word of God that the truth is preserved by her and passed on to others by her hands.
John Calvin
The fanaticism which discards the Scripture, under the pretense of resorting to immediate revelations is subversive of every principle of Christianity. For when they boast extravagantly of the Spirit, the tendency is always to bury the Word of God so they may make room for their own falsehoods.
John Calvin
The book in my hands became my trusted companion. What was written there had so much power that it forced me to stop avoiding myself, to make my own choices as well. And through some sort of vital intuition, I understood that I had a long way to go, that it would bring about a profound transformation within me, even though I could not determine it's essence, or its scope. In that book there was a voice, and behind that voice threw was an intelligence that sought to establish contact with me. It was not merely the company of written words that distiller my boredom. It was a living voice, speaking. To me.
Ingrid Betancourt
All things work together for good for those who are called according to His purpose.
Anne-Marie Pol
England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare,but the Bible made England.
Victor Hugo
Music is the silence between the notes.
Claude Debussy
The brief silence that follows is as tender as arainstorm of daisies.
Mathias Malzieu
In the black chaos where the seas and the skies become confused let the projectors blow their white trumpets of silence("Roundness")
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
They were silent, humiliated by this return of the defeated, furious at their own silence, but the more it was prolonged the less capable they were of breaking it.
Albert Camus
But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.
Maurice Blanchot
On days when it was too hot, they did not leave their room. The dazzling brilliance from outside plastered bars of light between the slats of the blinds. Not a sound in the village. Down below, on the sidewalk, no one. This spreading silence increased the tranquility of things. In the distance, the caulkers’ hammers tamped the hulls, and a heavy breeze brought the smell of tar.
Gustave Flaubert
I agree with Proust in this, he says, that books create their own silences in ways that friends rarely do. And the silence that grows palpable when one has finished a canto of Dante, he says, is quite different from the silence that grows palpable when one has reached the end of Oedipus at Colonus. The most terrible thing that has happened to people today, he says, is that they have grown frightened of silence. Instead of seeking it as a friend and as a source of renewal they now try in every way they can to shut it out... the fear of silence is the fear of loneliness, he says, and the fear of loneliness is the fear of silence. People fear silence, he says, because they have lost the ability to trust the world to bring about renewal. Silence for them means only the recognition that they have been abandoned... How can people find the strength to be happy if they are so terrified of silence?
Gabriel Josipovici
Your silence exists as does my self gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world's dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other, without taking breath away from them.
Luce Irigaray
And the wind falls silent, and the birds fall silent, and the wild cherry trees no longer shiver and creek.
Daniel Arsand
M. de Charlus persisted in not replying. I thought I could see a smile flicker about his lips: the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men.
Marcel Proust
It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, in other words to silence.
Albert Camus
Silence promotes the presence of God, prevents many harsh and proud words, and suppresses many dangers in the way of ridiculing or harshly judging our neighbors ... If you are faithful in keeping silence when it is not necessary to speak, God will preserve you from evil when it is right for you to talk.
François Fénelon
At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.
Albert Camus
When the owl sings, the night is silent. (Quand le hibou chante, La nuit est silence)
Charles de Leusse