Quotes by French Authors - Page 87

The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell.
André Malraux
Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.
André Gide
A translator, caught in the space between two tongues. Such people tend to come a little bit unglued from the task of trying to convey meaning from one code to the other. The transfer is never safe, the meaning changes in the channel — becomes tinted, adulterated, absurd, stronger.
Elena Mauli Shapiro
And the voice spoke even more deliberately: '...but remember what is under the ocean of clouds: eternity.'And suddenly that tranquil world, the world of such simple harmony that you discover as you rise above the clouds, took on an unfamiliar quality in my eyes. All that gentleness became a trap. In my mind's eye I saw that vast white trap laid out, right under my feet. Beneath it reigned neither the restlessness of men nor the living tumult and motion of cities, as one might have thought, but a silence that was even more absolute, a more final peace. That viscous whiteness was turning before my eyes into the boundary between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. And I was already beginning to sense that a spectacle has no meaning except when seen through a culture, a civilization, a professional craft.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot.
Eugène Ionesco
The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse.
Jean-Paul Sartre
All contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event.
Jean Baudrillard
It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.
Jean Baudrillard
There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.
Jean Baudrillard
Twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.
Jean Baudrillard
Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? ... Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.
Milan Kundera
What distresses us is not loosing life, but losing what gives it meaning.
Raymond Radiguet
Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.
Gilles Deleuze
The children laughing without knowing why - isn't that beautiful?
Milan Kundera
...The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész'a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images 'spoke too much'; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is (i)pensive(i), when it thinks.
Roland Barthes
Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.
Jacques Lacan
when man was put into the garden of eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not born to be idle.
Voltaire
What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?
Albert Camus
Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.
Voltaire
Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.
Milan Kundera
Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.
Jean-Paul Sartre
We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Speaking of Newton but also commenting more broadly on education and the Enlightenment: "I have seen a professor of mathematics only because he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.
Voltaire
We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
Jean-Paul Sartre
To be enlightened is to know oneself and not run away.
Veronique Vienne
I think I possess because I do not try to give,Trying to give, I see that I have nothing.
René Daumal
When I turn my mind's eye upon myself, I understand that I am a thing which is incomplete and dependent on another and which aspires without limit to ever greater and better things...
René Descartes
The ultimate reality from which the path of this becoming could start off again will no longer rest on a ground of 'causa sui.' in any case the sense of a God who would alone be capable of giving an account of self. It is rather from the human and from what the human most irreducibly is that it is a question of starting off again. From the human as it objectively is before it starts to construct a language and a thinking which help to distance it from its beginning, from its prematureness without thinking it in the totality of its being.
Luce Irigaray
Am I in love? – yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
Roland Barthes
The secret seemed to me much more mysterious than that; it was the secret, I thought, of one who had known death; for I moved a stranger among ordinary people, like a man who has risen from the grave, and at first I merely felt rather painfully out of my element; but soon I became aware of a very different feeling.Was it pride now? Perhaps; but at any rate there was no trace of vanity mixed with it. It was rather, for the first time, the consciousness of my own worth. What separated me - distinguished me - from other people was crucial; what no one said, what no one could say but myself, that was my task to say.
André Gide
Egotism fears its own self.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces.At meetings I was earnest, enthusiastic, and committed; among friends, unconstrained and given to teasing; with Marketa, cynical and fitfully witty; and alone (and thinking of Marketa), unsure of myself and as agitated as a schoolboy.Was the last face the real one?No. They were all real: I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn’t know who I was or wanted to be. (I was frightened by the differences between one face and the next; none of them seemed to fit me properly, and I groped my way clumsily among them.)
Milan Kundera
Thus the perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite, that is, my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself. For how would I understand that I doubt and that I desire, that is, that I lack something and that I am not wholly perfect, unless there were some idea in me of a more perfect being, by comparison with which I might recognize my defects?
René Descartes
It is often by a trivial, even an anecdotal decision, that we direct our activities into a certain channel, and thus determine which of the potential expressions of our individuality become manifest. Usually we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet toward which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.
René Dubos
I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said. I could never talk without boasting, especially if I did so with that shattering discretion that was my specialty. It is quite true that I always lived free and powerful. I simply felt released in the regard to all the for the excellent reason that I recognized no equals. I always considered myself more intelligent than everyone else, as I’ve told you, but also more sensitive and more skillful, a crack shot, an incomparable driver, a better lover. Even in the fields in which it was easy for me to verify my inferiority–like tennis, for instance, in which I was but a passable partner–it was hard for me not to think that, with a little time and practice, I would surpass the best players. I admitted only superiorities in me and this explained my good will and serenity. When I was concerned with others, I was so out of pure condescension, in utter freedom, and all the credit went to me: my self-esteem would go up a degree.
Albert Camus
What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.
Marcel Proust
I myself am an absolute abyss.
Antonin Artaud
I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight
Marguerite Duras
Certainly, if he still has himself, a man of understanding has lost nothing.
Michel de Montaigne
How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities?... I never feel the four walls around the substance of the self, the core. I feel only space. Illimitable space.
Anaïs Nin
We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us
André Gide
To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.
Simone de Beauvoir
I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.
Anaïs Nin
Achieving a goal is nothing. The getting there is everything.
Jules Michelet
One does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or - which is the same thing - when his goal is infinity.
Émile Durkheim
I'm sick and tired of having a forest and a torture chamber in my house... I want to have a nice quiet flat with ordinary doors and windows and a wife inside it, like anybody else!
Gaston Leroux
If you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent them from growing.
Coco Chanel
It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory
Victor Hugo
plantitIt will sproutBut forget about the rustic festivitiesFor the explosive word falls harmlessly eternal throughthe compact generations
Jean Cocteau
Her body accepted my brutal seed and took it to swell within, just as the patient earth accepts a falling fruit into its tender soil to cradle and nourish it to grow. Came a time, just springtime last, our infant child pushed through the fragile barrier of her womb. Her legs branched out, just as the wood branches out from these eternal trees around us; but she was not hardy as they. My wife groaned with blood and ceased to breathe. Aye!, a scornful eve that bred the kind of pain only a god can withstand.
Roman Payne
You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
even so did you feel yourself swept away by that inward migration about which no one had ever said a word to you…A great wind swept through and delivered from the matrix the sleeping prince you sheltered- man within you. You are the equal of the musician composing his music, of the physicist extending the frontier of knowledge…you have reached an altitude where all loves are of the same stuff.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
there is no growth except in the fulfillment of obligations
Antoine De Saint Exupery
There is no man...however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man...
Marcel Proust
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anaïs Nin
What makes night within us may leave stars.
Victor Hugo
What we strive to restore and re-animate will never come from the promises of the middle class politicians, but will come instead from the spirit of the last Delphic prophecy, which foresaw that, ‘One day Apollo will return and it will be forever’.
Guillaume Faye
Make yourself familiar with the angels and behold them frequently in spirit; for without being seen, they are present with you.
Francis de Sales
The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.
Charles Baudelaire
Oh! Science! Everything has been revised. For the body and for the soul,--the viaticum,—there are medicine and philosophy,—old wives' remedies and popular songs rearranged. And the pastimes of princes and games they proscribed! Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry!...Science, the new nobility! Progress. The world marches on! Why shouldn’t it turn?It is the vision of numbers. We are going toward the Spirit. There’s no doubt about it, an oracle, I tell you. I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.
Arthur Rimbaud