Quotes by French Authors - Page 84

It is the dim haze of mystery that adds enchantment to pursuit.
Antoine Rivarol
Alas, God's poor ministers are just as much in the dark as we are. You must believe like old women believe, the ones that look like witches, who mumble to themselves in churches under the nose of cheap, plaster saints. As soon as you start to use your reason, to look for a rainbow, you always run up against the great excuse, mystery. You will be advised to light some candles, put coins in the box, say a few rosaries, and make yourself stupid.
Gabriel Chevallier
Mystery of love is like digging water: everything closes. (Mystère de l'amour est comme - Creuser l'eau : tout se referme)
Charles de Leusse
Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe. If he begets an impure act, he perhaps darkens thousands of hearts whom he does not know, who are mysteriously linked to him, and who need this man to be pure as a traveller dying of thirst needs the Gospel’s draught of water. A charitable act, an impulse of real pity sings for him the divine praises, from the time of Adam to the end of the ages; it cures the sick, consoles those in despair, calms storms, ransoms prisoners, converts the infidel and protects mankind
Léon Bloy
...a redoubtable alchemy was at work behind impenetrable veils as the forest prepared its nocturnal mysteries.
Julien Gracq
We have come from all the countries of the world and are going to Saintes-Maries de la Mer. Nomads of the enigma, we gather there each year after having carried our mystery through ordinary countryside and fluid towns. Since we become transformed by our wanderings we are despised by those who stand still and retain a memory of giant serpents and metallic green.
Raymond Queneau
How fathomless the mystery of the Unseen is! We cannot plumb its depths with our feeble senses - with eyes which cannot see the infinitely small or the infinitely great, nor anything too close or too distant, such as the beings who live on a star or the creatures which live in a drop of water... with ears that deceive us by converting vibrations of the air into tones that we can hear, for they are sprites which miraculously change movement into sound, a metamorphosis which gives birth to harmonies which turn the silent agitation of nature into song... with our sense of smell, which is poorer than any dog's... with our sense of taste, which is barely capable of detecting the age of a wine!Ah! If we had other senses which would work other miracles for us, how many more things would we not discover around us!
Guy de Maupassant
As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.
Roland Barthes
And silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxication life, instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions, mathematics of emotion in place of violent impact, the volcanic eruptions of fever, lust and delight.
Anaïs Nin
...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.
Jacques Lacan
Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.
Albert Camus
Or she would look at him with a sullen expression, once again he would see before him a face worthy of figuring in Botticelli's Life of Moses, he would place her in it, he would give her neck the necessary inclination; and when he had well and truly painted her in distemper, in the fifteenth century, on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, the idea that she had nevertheless remained here, by the piano, in the present moment, ready to be kissed and possessed, the idea of her materiality and her life would intoxicate him with such force that, his eyes distracted, his jaw tensed as though to devour her, he would swoop down upon that Botticelli virgin and begin pinching her cheeks.
Marcel Proust
An unknown force is calling mePerhaps the voice of that star perched on the last heightPerhaps the desire to see the spaces that conceal Europe
Hélène Baronne d’Oettingen
Amuse yourself, torment your desires. Drink when you're thirsty -- that would be very much too simple! If you didn't harbour a temptation eternally in your soul, you'd run the risk of forgetting yourself.
Jean-Paul Sartre
What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?
Michel Foucault
We are drawn towards a thing, either because there is some good we are seeking from it, or because we cannot do without it. Sometimes the two motives coincide. Often however they do not. Each is distinct and quite independent. We eat distasteful food, if we have nothing else, because we cannot do otherwise. A moderately greedy man looks out for delicacies, but he can easily do without them. If we have no air we are suffocated, we struggle to get it, not because we expect to get some advantage from it but because we need it. We go in search of sea air without being driven by any necessity, because we like it. In time it often comes about automatically that the second motive takes the place of the first. This is one of the great misfortunes of our race. A man spokes opium in order to attain to a special condition, which he thinks superior; often, as time goes on, the opium reduces him to a miserable condition which he feels to be degrading; but he is no longer able to do without it.
Simone Weil
We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.
Anaïs Nin
The truth is that this is the only way I can live: in two directions. I need two lives. I am two beings. When I return to Hugo in the evening, to the peace and warmth of the house, I return with deep contentment, as if this was the only condition for me. I bring home to Hugo a whole woman, freed of all 'possessed' fevers, cured of the poison of restlessness and curiosity which used to threaten our marriage, cured through action. Our love lives, because I live. I sustain and feed it. I am loyal to it, in my own way, which cannot be his way. If he ever reads these lines, he must believe me. I am writing calmly, lucidly while waiting for him to come home, as one waits for the chosen lover, the eternal one.
Anaïs Nin
The skin is a variety of contingency: in it, through it, with it, the world and my body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common edge. Contingency means common tangency: in it the world and the body intersect and caress each other. I do not wish to call the place in which I live a medium, I prefer to say that things mingle with each other and that I am no exception to that. I mix with the world which mixes with me. Skin intervenes between several things in the world and makes them mingle.
Michel Serres
I have indeed lived and worked to my taste either in art or science. What more could a man desire? Knowledge has always been my goal. There is much that I shall leave behind undone…but something at least I was privileged to leave for the world to use, if it so intends…As the Latin poet said I will leave the table of the living like a guest who has eaten his fill. Yes, if I had another life to spend, I certainly would not waste it. But that cannot be, so why complain?
Léon Camille Marius Croizat
She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes.
Gustave Flaubert
Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.
Roland Barthes
There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one's mind.
Marcel Proust
We consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so.
Marcel Proust
The comedy in our lives was those first few weeks we lived together in Paris: Our bodies desired one another, our souls opened for one another. We experienced all of the happiness and anguish of first love. Those first few weeks in Paris, we barely touched lips; yet the few times we did, it had the force of a collision of stars.
Roman Payne
If three steps are taken without any other motive than the desire to obey God, those three steps are miraculous; they are equally so whether they take place on dry land or on water.
Simone Weil
This was to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some even greater variation, that she did not pass through those abnormal hours in which one thirsts for something different from what one has, when those people who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, in their eagerness for news (even if it be bad news), for some emotion (even that of grief); when the heartstrings, which prosperity has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, even a brutal hand, even if it shall break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty brought itself to subdue to its impulse, to renounce its right to abandon itself to its own uncontrolled desires, and consequent sufferings, would fain cast its guiding reins into the hands of circumstances, coercive and, it may be, cruel.
Marcel Proust
All that I desire in life are three...A wilderness: A beach on the sun-drenched sea,A puff of opium,And thee.
Roman Payne
She abandoned herself to his whim, thinking it was to be an orgy of eyes and hands only.
Anaïs Nin
Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the human spirit. For then the creature in whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided, that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love. It is not necessary that she should have pleased us, up till then, any more, or even as much as others. All that is necessary is that our taste for her should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled so soon as - in the moment when she has failed to meet us - for the pleasure which we were on the point of enjoying in her charming company is abruptly substituted an anxious torturing desire, whose object is the creature herself, an irrational, absurd desire, which the laws of civilised society make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage - the insensate, agonising desire to possess her.
Marcel Proust
... Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart.
Marcel Proust
He made what apology he could and hurried home, overjoyed that the satisfaction of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having feigned for so long, when in Odette's company, a sort of indifference, he had not now, by a demonstration of jealousy, given her that proof of the excess of his own passion which, in a pair of lovers, fully and finally dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love the other enough. He never spoke to her of this misadventure, he cased even to think of it himself. But now and then his thoughts in their wandering course would come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would startle it into life, thrust it more deeply down into his consciousness, and leave him aching with a sharp, far-rooted pain.
Marcel Proust
If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.
André Maurois
There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to show that he had spent the most wonderful year of his life with her.Which only increased his desire to remain faithful to her.
Milan Kundera
The essence of desire is to have no essential goal. Truly to desire, we must have recourse to people about us; we have to desire their desires.
René Girard
It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock-market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows, money that produces more money? There are socioeconomic "complexes" that are also veritable complexes of the unconscious, and that communicate a voluptuous wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy (the military-industrial complex). And ideology, Oedipus, and the phallus have nothing to do with this, because they depend on it rather than being its impetus. For it is a matter of flows, of stocks, of breaks in and fluctuations of flows; desire is present wherever something flows and runs, carrying along with it interested subjects—but also drunken or slumbering subjects—toward lethal destinations.
Gilles Deleuze
You didn't have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn't exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been.
Marguerite Duras
Life is no more than the repeated fulfilling of a permanent desire.
Alexandre Dumas
Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away.
Gustave Flaubert
... Desire baffles knowledge and power.
Jean-François Lyotard
I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire.
Marguerite Yourcenar
It displeases me to have some creature think that he can foresee and profit from my desire, automatically adapting himself to what he supposes to be my taste.
Marguerite Yourcenar
...it's better to wake up amid the pangs of desire than amid those of remorse.
Amin Maalouf
One must count ones riches by the means one has to satisfy his desires.
Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles
There's a chasm between envy and desire. Envy is like wanting something that's not yours. But desire is different. Desire comes out of wanting what is yours, and still wanting it even if it's not yet there, but it's not envy.
Michka Assayas
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire
Roland Barthes
...he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...
Albert Camus
It has become necessary for me to have this woman, so as to save myself from the ridicule of being in love with her: for to what lengths will a man not be driven by thwarted desire?
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
It is much easier to extinguish a first desire than to satisfy all of those that follow it.
François de La Rochefoucauld
There are few things we should keenly desire if we really knew what we wanted.
François de La Rochefoucauld
To wish a healthy man to die is the wish from a mind of sickness. To wish an ailing man to die is the wish of the ambitious.
Roman Payne
And in his eyes he had the look of the cat who inspires a desire to caress but loves no one, who never feels he must respond to the impulses he arouses.
Anaïs Nin
This great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes air, or swallows a snowflake, or yields to the sun.
Anaïs Nin
Now, I'm not going to deny that I was aware of your beauty. But the point is, this has nothing to do with your beauty. As I got to know you, I began to realise that beauty was the least of your qualities. I became fascinated by your goodness. I was drawn in by it. I didn't understand what was happening to me. And it was only when I began to feel actual, physical pain every time you left the room that it finally dawned on me: I was in love, for the first time in my life. I knew it was hopeless, but that didn't matter to me. And it's not that I want to have you. All I want is to deserve you. Tell me what to do. Show me how to behave. I'll do anything you say.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.
Voltaire
Monsieur Josserand died very quietly - a victim of his own honesty. He had lived a useless life, and he went off, worthy to the last, weary of all the petty things in life, done to death by the heartless conduct of the only human beings that he had ever loved.
Émile Zola
What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure.
Milan Kundera
But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite.
Simone de Beauvoir
The artist's greatest creation beganthe night he washed his memory of his failuresrubbed opium on his lipsdrank the wine that women offered himand lay down and wept.
Roman Payne
That he had no scruples; for, said he, when I fail in my duty, I readily acknowledge it, saying, I am used to do so: I shall never do otherwise, if I am left to myself. If I fail not, then I give GOD thanks, acknowledging that it comes from Him.
Brother Lawrence