Quotes by French Authors - Page 92

Adeline was really rather charming, she always had a man in her life, but it never worked out: either they were nice but she didn't find them very exciting; or they were exciting but she didn't find them particularly nice, or they were neither nice nor exciting and she wondered why she was with them at all. She found a way of making the exciting men nicer and that was by leaving them. But then, they weren't exciting anymore either.
François Lelord
Men are all the same. Novelty amongst themselves displeases and upsets them – but if the novelty is wearing a skirt, they go crazy f
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God and a coward towards men.
Michel de Montaigne
But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do. And what is that compared to the magnificent uselessness of a woman's face? Mersault was aware of this now, delighting in his vanity and smiling at his secret demons.
Albert Camus
Hortense and Berthe nodded, as though profoundly impressed by the wisdom of their mother's pronouncements. She had long since convinced them of the absolute inferiority of men, whose sole function was to marry and to pay.
Émile Zola
Men lose more conquests by their own awkwardness than by any virtue in the woman.
Ninon de l'Enclos
Men can be pitiless towards a woman whose body has eluded them, particularly if this is thanks to their own cowardice.
Andreï Makine
I cannot stand the company of men. They flatter or they judge. I can stand neither of the two.
Albert Camus
With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated. How many men resemble the nettle!" He added with a pause: "Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.
Victor Hugo
Men? One never knows where to find them. The wind blows them away. They have no roots, and that makes their life very difficult.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Believe me, my boy, women don't love a man for himself but as a weapon against other women.
Irène Némirovsky
Don't you think, that there are very few men who know, without raising their voice or changing their tone, to say...what has to be said?
Colette
There is a certain kind of stupidity reserved for women's dealings with men.
Françoise Sagan
Ah! A man who doesn't know how to watch love is so silly. You really need a lesson.
Rachilde
As for men, they must learn bravery and live for Pleasure and for Beauty. More important than those two things should stand only one thing for him... Honor. A man's honor should be more sacred to him than his life — especially in our age, a time when very few men know what honor is.
Roman Payne
As long as you know most men are like children, you know everything.
Coco Chanel
I noticed a phenomenon that doesn't often happen toa man: several women turned round as he passed them.
Patrick Modiano
Men’s economic privilege, their social value, the prestige of marriage, the usefulness of masculine support—all these encourage women to ardently want to please men. They are on the whole still in a state of serfdom. It follows that woman knows and chooses herself not as she exists for herself but as man defines her. She thus has to be described first as men dream of her since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition.
Simone de Beauvoir
The women’s entire education should be planned in relation to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to win their love and respect, to raise them as children, care for them as adults… these are women’s duties in all ages and these are what they should be taught from childhood.
Jacques Rousseau
In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her. And 50, at an age when it would appear - since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective pleasure - that the taste for feminine beauty must play the larger part in its procreation, love may come into being, love of the most physical order, without any foundation in desire. At this time of life a man has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before his passive and astonished heart. We come to its aid; we falsify it by memory and by suggestion; recognising one of its symptoms we recall and recreate the rest.
Marcel Proust
...then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer.
Anaïs Nin
Men are so inevitably mad that not to be mad would be to give a mad twist to madness.
Blaise Pascal
Men are so isolated, prisoners of their own wretched selves, that they can be unbelievably sociable.
Jacques Yonnet
Men's pride is situated in their scrotums.
Marjane Satrapi
Death belongs only to God. What right have men to lay hands on a thing so unknown?
Victor Hugo
He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs for one another.
Albert Camus
A pessimist is a man who tells the truth prematurely.
Cyrano de Bergerac
Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless creature?
Honoré de Balzac
Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex...
Gustave Flaubert
Man is more attractive when left to the imagination.
Michèle Halberstadt
Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.
Simone de Beauvoir
To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades. It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
May a man live well-enough and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him.
Roman Payne
I gave myself to you sooner than I ever did to any man, I swear to you; and do you know why? Because when you saw me spitting blood you took my hand; because you wept; because you are the only human being who has ever pitied me. I am going to say a mad thing to you: I once had a little dog who looked at me with a sad look when I coughed; that is the only creature I ever loved. When he died I cried more than when my mother died. It is true that for twelve years of her life she used to beat me. Well, I loved you all at once, as much as my dog. If men knew what they can have for a tear, they would be better loved and we should be less ruinous to them.
Alexandre Dumas fils
Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.
Albert Camus
I like men to behave like men. I like them strong and childish.
Françoise Sagan
Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so.
Charles de Gaulle
A man is responsible for his ignorance.
Milan Kundera
Wherever you go in the next catastrophéBe it sickroom, or prison, or cemet’ryDo not fear that your stay will besolit’ryCountless souls share your fate,you’ll have company!
Roman Payne
What criterion ought one to adopt to judge one's fellows? After all, there was not a single person he knew who might not, in certain circumstances, prove capable of a shameful action.
Marcel Proust
...we need to bear in mind that our opinion of other people, our ties with friends or family, have only the semblance of fixity and are, in fact, as eternally fluid as the sea.
Marcel Proust
Friend," replied Michael Strogoff, "Heaven reward thee for all thou hast done for me!""Only fools expect reward on earth," replied the mujik.
Jules Verne
You can tell who your friends are because they don’t prevent you from being on your own, because they illuminate your solitude without interrupting it.
Christian Bobin
Presently, one after another, like shyly hopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow.
Marcel Proust
Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.
Colette
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
Victor Hugo
It is because of this sea between us. The earth has never, up to now, separated us. But, ever since yesterday, there has been something in this nonetheless real, perfectly Atlantic, salty, slightly rough sea that has cast a spell on me. And every time I think about Promethea, I see her crossing this great expanse by boat and soon, alas, a storm comes up, my memory clouds over, in a flash there are shipwrecks, I cannot even cry out, my mouth is full of saltwater sobs. I am flooded with vague, deceptive recollections, I am drowning in my imagination in tears borrowed from the most familiar tragedies, I wish I had never read certain books whose poison is working in me. Has this Friday, perhaps, thrown a spell on me? But spells only work if you catch them. I have caught the Tragic illness. If only Promethea would make me some tea I know I would find some relief. But that is exactly what is impossible. And so, today, I am sinning. I am sinking beneath reality. I am weighted down with literature. That is my fate. Yet I had the presence of mind to start this parenthesis, the only healthy moment in these damp, feverish hours. All this to try to come back to the surface of our book... Phone me quickly, Promethea, get me out of this parenthesis fast!)
Hélène Cixous
We all live like cockroaches in the crevices of our imagination.
Raymond Federman
Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.
Marcel Proust
It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.
Marcel Proust
Childhood is a human water, a water which comes out of the shadows. This childhood in the mists and glimmers, this life in the slowness of limbo gives us a certain layer of births. What a lot of beings we have begun! What a lot of lost springs which have nevertheless, flowed! Reverie toward our past then, reverie looking for childhood seems to bring back lives which which have never taken place, lives which have been imagined. Reverie is a mnemonics of the imagination. In reverie we re-enter into contact with possibilities which destitute has not been able to make use of.
Gaston Bachelard
Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.
Charles Baudelaire
I could spend whole days at Cinecittà. There, I am the greatest director of all time. On the town side, I reshoot the close-ups for Touch of Evil. Down at the beach, I rework the dolly shots for Stagecoach, and offshore I re-create the storm rocking the smugglers of Moonfleet.
Jean-Dominique Bauby
Those for whom the world is not enough: saints, conquerors, poets, and all lovers of books.
Joseph Joubert
I may be a little like the grown-ups. I must have grown old.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The imagination is always more horrible than the truth.
Hervé Guibert
I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars
Simone de Beauvoir
In this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject.
Roland Barthes
For a young man has strong imagination but poor judgment, so that he imagines others to be as big as he is but considers himself to be very small. He has unbounded trust in the universe but is constantly unsure of himself.
Marcel Proust
The wretchedness of ordinary life, endured so gaily when it is part of our normal existence, is made far worse when it comes as something new, and is exaggerated by the working of the imagination.
Marcel Proust