Quotes by French Authors - Page 79

Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.
Voltaire
The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
In silence alone does a man's truth bind itself together and strike root.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh – which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.
Michel Foucault
Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man....
Jean-Paul Sartre
The sublime can only be found in the great subjects. Poetry, history and philosophy all have the same object, and a very great object—Man and Nature. Philosophy describes and depicts Nature. Poetry paints and embellishes it. It also paints men, it aggrandizes them, it exaggerates them, it creates heroes and gods. History only depicts man, and paints him such as he is.
Georges-Louis Leclerc
Genius and science have burst the limits of space, and few observations, explained by just reasoning, have unveiled the mechanism of the universe. Would it not also be glorious for man to burst the limits of time, and, by a few observations, to ascertain the history of this world, and the series of events which preceded the birth of the human race?
Georges Cuvier
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
Honoré de Balzac
Men are stupid and ignorant. That is why they suffer. Instead of thinking, they believe all that they are told, all that they are taught. They choose their lords and masters without judging them, with a fatal taste for slavery.
Gabriel Chevallier
The knowledge of God without that of man's misery causes pride. The knowledge of man's misery without that of God causes despair. The knowledge of Jesus Christ is the middle course, because in Him we find both God and our misery.
Blaise Pascal
Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary. He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he drops through the trapdoor another puppet is in readiness to take his place.
Rémy de Gourmont
The cat that laughs is crazy. Man who does not laugh is below... (Le chat qui rit est un fou. - Homme qui ne rit est dessous...)
Charles de Leusse
... which would enable him to prolong for the time being, and to renew for one day more the disappointment, the torturing deception that must always come to him with the vain presence of this woman, whom he might approach, yet never dared embrace.
Marcel Proust
... he was like a man into whose life a woman, whom he has seen for a moment passing by, has brought a new form of beauty, which strengthens and enlarges his own power of perception, without his knowing even whether he is ever to see her again whom he loves already, although he knows nothing of her, not even her name.
Marcel Proust
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
Armand Jean du Plessis Richelieu
God became man; and the love, woman. (Dieu s'est fait homme; - Et l'amour, femme.)
Charles de Leusse
It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.
Michel Foucault
Among the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things ... only one, which began a century and a half ago ... has allowed the figure of man to appear.
Michel Foucault
If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...?
Blaise Pascal
But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do.
Albert Camus
Man always becomes other. Man is the animal who continually differs from himself.
Georges Bataille
You don't mean to say that Hogan has turned into a woman? Why, yes, that's him all right, you can recognize him by the fact that he has two legs, two arms, and an indecipherable face. Man, woman, what difference does it make? Are they not all exactly the same, these little black insects with their rhythmic movements, the same eyes, the same thoughts?
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
An optimist is a man who plant two acorns and buy a hammock.
Jean de Lattre de Tassigny
mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another.
Voltaire
In order to know virtue, we must acquaint ourselves with vice. Only then can we know the true measure of a man.
Marquis de Sade
Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.
Milan Kundera
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
Anatole France
Man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.
John Calvin
Men argue. Nature acts.
Voltaire
We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.
Anaïs Nin
The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.
Charles de Gaulle
Will you, then, never grow weary of being unjust?
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
Voltaire
Unique feelings are so unique that they can not be popularized. Feelings without words in the dictionary disappear. Every year thousands of feelings disappear for lack of a concrete form.
Isidore Isou
Feelings demand living space.
Isidore Isou
Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Take an eye for an eye, turn your heart into stone, this all I have lived for, this all I have known.
Les Miserables
One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ‘the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.
Gustave Flaubert
Where would we be in this soulless universe if there weren't a few people who hold on to memories, their hearts yearning for long-lost feelings?
Nicolas Barreau
He had fallen in love with her emotions, and that was a very profound feeling indeed.
François Lelord
The looming storm broke in the end. And it is the storm I will remember, the sound of the downpour splattering over the steps of the Tuileries, the dark sky and the pink lightning. I could have stayed like that for centuries.
Hélène Berr
My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Frederick expected that he would have felt spasms of joy; but the passions grow pale when we find ourselves in an altered situation; and, as he no longer saw Madame Arnoux in the environment wherein he had known her, she seemed to him to have lost some of her fascination; to have degenerated in some way that he could not comprehend—in fact, not to be the same. He was astonished at the serenity of his own heart./... sentimentele slăbesc cînd le schimbi locul...
Gustave Flaubert
The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
Milan Kundera
I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.
Albert Camus
...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.
Milan Kundera
When we find that we have been aroused to anger we must call for God's help like the apostles when they were tossed about by the wind and storm on the waters. He will command your passions to cease and there will be a great calm.
Francis de Sales
The best vaccine against anger is to watch others in its throes.
Marcel Proust
Confront all the angry thoughts, feelings, the jealousies and condemnations, to find their cause, seek the root of such feelings and then operate on that. Need of security and reassurance can cause criminal acts.
Anaïs Nin
There is no passion so much transports thesincerity of judgement as doth anger
Michel de Montaigne
Her anger was rekindled.'You see, I keep it to myself, but, oh! it's more than I can stand. Don't say anything, sir; don't say anything , or I'll explode!'He said nothing, and she exploded all the same.
Émile Zola
Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. We lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year's time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings.
André Maurois
...imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.
Hector Berlioz
To know your way round a library is to master the whole of culture, i.e. the whole world.
Sophie Divry
In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.
Albert Camus
What we mean when we say that something is "cultural" is that it is roughly similar to what we find in other members of the particular group we are considering, and unlike what we would find in members of a contrast group. This is why it is confusing to say that people share a culture, as if culture were common property. We may have strictly identical amounts of money in our respective wallets without sharing any of it!
Pascal Boyer
Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit.
Raymond Loewy
Before saying anything further about culture, I consider the world is hungry and does not care about culture, and people artificially want to turn these thoughts away from hunger and direct them towards culture.
Antonin Artaud
Civilization is in fact the longest story of all. Civilization can persist through a series of economies.
Fernand Braudel
The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democracy, from beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep.
Alexis de Tocqueville