Quotes by French Authors - Page 77

The Jews are an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.
Voltaire
[Science] dissipates errors born of ignorance about our true relations with nature, errors the more damaging in that the social order should rest only on those relations. TRUTH! JUSTICE! Those are the immutable laws. Let us banish the dangerous maxim that it is sometimes useful to depart from them and to deceive or enslave mankind to assure its happiness.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
People often mistake their imagination for their heart, & so often are convinced they are converted as soon as they start thinking of becoming converted.
Blaise Pascal
Ignorance is the necessary condition, i do not say of happiness, but of life itself. If we knew everything, we could not endure existence a single hour. The sentiments that make it sweet to us, or at any rate tolerable, spring from a falsehood, and are fed on illusions.If, like God, a man possessed the truth, the sole and perfect truth, and once let it escape out of his hands, the world would be annihilated there and then, and the universe melt away instantly like a shadow.
Anatole France
The evil that is in the world comes out of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. One the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.
Albert Camus
There were some things it was better not to know. They caused "metaphysical" anguish, for which there was as yet no remedy. When it was worried, the Tribe was inhibited and unable to act.It was very bad for everyone. The Tribe started to produce toxins that poisoned it. Its long-term survival was more important than short-term knowledge of the truth. If an eye had seen something that the brain knew was dangerous for the rest of the organism, it was better for the brain to put out that eye.
Bernard Werber
So what I had believed to be nothing to me was simply my entire life. How ignorant one is of oneself.
Marcel Proust
It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd I know on what it is founded, this mind and this world straining against each other without being able to embrace each other. I ask for the rule— of life of that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis,negates one of the terms of the painful opposition, demands of me a resignation. I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as mine; I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is mylight.
Albert Camus
For myself, I wouldn't have lifted a finger to own a Rolex, a pair of Nikes or a BMW Z3; in fact, I had never succeeded in identifying the slightest difference between designer goods and non-designer goods. In the eyes of the world, I was clearly wrong. I was aware of this: I was in a minority, and consequently in the wrong. There had to be a difference between Yves Saint-Laurent shirts and other shirts, between Gucci moccasins and Andre moccasins. I was alone in not perceiving this difference; it was an infirmity which I could not cite as grounds for condemning the world. Does one ask a blind man to set himself up as an expert on post-impressionist painting? Through my blindness, however involuntary, I set myself apart from a living human reality powerful enough to incite both devotion and crime. These youths, through their half-savage instincts, undoubtedly discerned the presence of beauty; their desire was laudable, and perfectly in keeping with social norms; it was merely a question of rectifying the inappropriate way in which it was expressed.
Michel Houellebecq
He himself was one of your noisy roisterers, for whom life holds no greater pleasures than wine and bought women. Outside these two poles of existence, he understood nothing. Braggart, brawler, contemptuous of every living person, he despised the whole world from the heights of his ignorance.
Guy de Maupassant
[There's] a number of questionable characters whose goal is clearly not to disseminate information, but to prolong their pathetic reign by controlling people through a highly-organized and continued engineering of ignorance.
Marc Vouillot
Consider this: when you stand at the entry to a steel factory, you can make out through the smoke some men, some metal, the fires. The furnaces roar, the hammers crash; and the metalworkers who forge ingots, weapons, tools, and so on are completely ignorant of the real uses to which their products will be put. The workers can only refer to their products by conventional names. Well, that's where we all stand, all of us! Nobody can see the real character of what he creates because every knife blade may become a dagger, and the use to which an object is put changes both its name and its nature. Only our ignorance shields us from terrible responsibilities.
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
Albert Camus
Memory cannot be understood, either, without a mathematical approach. The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the lived life and the amount of time from that life that is stored in memory. No one has ever tried to calculate this ratio, and in fact there exists no technique for doing so; yet without much risk of error I could assume that the memory retains no more than a millionth, a hundred-millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life. That fact too is part of the essence of man. If someone could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could at any time call up any fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings: neither his loves nor his friendships nor his angers nor his capacity to forgive or avenge would resemble ours.We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed.
Milan Kundera
The only victories which leave no regret are those which are gained over ignorance.
Napoléon Bonaparte
If ignorance is bliss, there should be more happy people.
Victor Cousin
Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.
Voltaire
In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.
Honoré de Balzac
There is nothing to be found in human eyes, and that is their terrifying and dolorous enigma, their abominable and delusive charm. There is nothing but that which we put there ourselves. That is why honest gazes are only to be found in portraits.The faded and weary eyes of martyrs, expressions tortured by ecstasy, imploring and suffering eyes, some resigned, others desperate... the gazes of saints, mendicants and princesses in exile, with pardoning smiles... the gazes of the possessed, the chosen and the hysterical... and sometimes of little girls, the eyes of Ophelia and Canidia, the eyes of virgins and witches... as you live in the museums, what eternal life, dolorous and intense, shines out of you! Like precious stones enshrined between the painted eyelids of masterpieces, you disturb us across time and across space, receivers of the dream which created you!You have souls, but they are those of the artists who wished you into being, and I am delivered to despair and mortification because I have drunk the draught of poison congealed in the irises of your eyes.The eyes of portraits ought to be plucked out.
Jean Lorrain
Never subject to the rules, believing that the correct judgement and healthy nature keep her in the honesty she lived in.
Émile Zola
Men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends
Alexis de Tocqueville
In a world in which everyone cheats, it's the honest man who passes for a charlatan.
André Gide
He who lives without folly is not as wise as he may think.
François de La Rochefoucauld
The great would not think themselves demigods if the little did not worship them.
Pierre-Claude-Victor Boiste
In general I strive for greatness and rational achievement, but I admit to you I’ve a terrible fondness for women, a tendency towards drunkenness, and a weakness for the fumes of the poppy—opium and other miserable beauties.
Roman Payne
Every one is fond of comparing himself to something great and grandiose, as Louis XIV likened himself to the sun, and others have had like similes. I am more humble. I am a mere street scavenger (chiffonier) of science. With my hook in my hand and my basket on my back, I go about the streets of science, collecting what I find.
François Magendie
To achieve great things, we must live as though we were never going to die.
Luc de Clapiers de Vauvenargues
We need to get acquainted with mediocrity to notice greatness.
Olivier Magny
The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need.
Napoléon Bonaparte
In our time no one has the conception of what is great. It is up to me to show them.
Napoléon Bonaparte
What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born. Her face, at once innocent and feral, soft and wild! Her mouth voluptuous. Eyes deep as oceans, her eyes as wide as planets. I likened her to the slender Psyché and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: the dusty hems of her bunched-up skirt, the worn straps of her nightshirt; the blackened soles of her tiny bare feet, the coal-stained balcony bricks upon which she sat, and that dusty wrought-ironwork that framed her perch. All this and the pungent air!—almost foul, with so many odors. Ô, that and the spicy night! …Pungency, spice, filth and night, dust and light; all things dark did blossom in sight; flower and bloom, the night has its pearl too—the moon! And once a month it will make the face of this tender girl bloom.
Roman Payne
Beauty is one of the rare things which does not lead to doubt of God.
Jean Anouilh
It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it: I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so. But it doesn't strike me. At heart, I am even shocked that anyone can attribute qualities of this kind to it, as if you called a clod of earth or a block of stone beautiful or ugly.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Usually, the murmur that rises up from Paris by day is the city talking; in the night it is the city breathing; but here it is the city singing. Listen, then, to this chorus of bell-towers - diffuse over the whole the murmur of half a million people - the eternal lament of the river - the endless sighing of the wind - the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed upon the hills, in the distance, like immense organpipes - extinguish to a half light all in the central chime that would otherwise be too harsh or too shrill; and then say whetehr you know of anything in the world more rich, more joyous, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes - this furnace of music - these thousands of brazen voices, all singing together in flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than this city which is but one orchestra - this symphony which roars like a tempest.
Victor Hugo
He was fine; he, that orphan that foundling that outcast; he felt himself august and strong; he looked full in the face that society from which he was banished, and into which he had so powerfully intervened; that human justice from which he had snatched its prey; all those tigers whose jaws perforce remained empty; those myrmidons, those judges, those executioners, all that royal power which he, poor, insignificant being, had foiled with the power of God.
Victor Hugo
Her [Odette's] eyes were beautiful, but so large they seemed to droop beneath their own weight, strained the rest of her face and always made her appear unwell or in a bad mood.
Marcel Proust
The beautiful must be incongruous.
Julien Torma
No man sings as beautifully as when his song is accompanied by a woman’s voice.
Roman Payne
All the stars are a riot of flowers.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
We were created to look at one another, weren't we
Edgar Degas
[I]t is that we are too apt to despise what appears to be neither good nor beautiful, and thus we lose what is helpful and salutary.
George Sand
The quarrels of lovers are like summer storms. Everything is more beautiful when they have passed.
Madame Necker
...But friends, those I wanted to please? There are so few, so few... and you're one of them. You... because you have such a gift for life. You grab hold of it with both hands. You move, you dance, you know how to make the rain and the sunshine in a home. You have this incredible gift for making people around you happy. You're so at ease, so at ease on this little planet...
Anna Gavalda
He fell as gently as a tree falls. There was not even any sound..
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Beyond the curve of his days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity--happiness was human, eternity ordinary.
Albert Camus
[mother] belonged to a realm of other creatures: smaller, lighter, more easily blown away.
Milan Kundera
Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.
Man Ray
We are all lumps, and of so various and inform a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and others.
Michel de Montaigne
Animal banished from life, man's condition is tragic, for he no longer finds fulfillment in life's simple values. For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark. An irreversible question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find, any answers. Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one.
Emil M. Cioran
As far back as I can remember, I’ve utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship with some other band of apes.
Emil M. Cioran
Quite half of the human race was in tears.
Marcel Proust
To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.
Alphonse de Lamartine
Your heart is the correspondent of your soul. It knows the grooves of joy.
Karen Ruimy
You are young," replied Athos, "and your bitter memories have time to change into sweet ones.
Alexandre Dumas
Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss.
Rémy de Gourmont
Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my childhood was ending in an explosion of unreal passion that made my life feel sacred and holy.
Roman Payne
Nothing is perfect," sighed the fox. "My life is very monotonous. I run after the chickens; the men run after me. All the chickens are the same; all the men are the same. Consequently, I get a little bored. But if you tame me, my days will be as if filled with sunlight. I shall know the sound of a footstep different from all the rest. ...You see the fields of corn? Well, I don't eat bread. Corn is of no use to me. Corn fields remind me of nothing. Which is sad. On the other hand, your hair is the colour of gold. So think how wonderful it will be when you have tamed me. The corn, which is golden, will remind me of you. And I will come to love the sound of the wind in the field of corn.The fox fell silent and looked steadily at the little prince for a long time."Please," he said, "tame me!
Antoine De Saint Exupery
she had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and non-love.
Milan Kundera
Years don't mean anything, only what happens in them.
Nicolas Barreau
Childhood memories surge back more vividly midway through life – like some palimpsest whose original text suddenly reappears after the manuscript has been chemically treated.
Gérard de Nerval