Quotes by French Authors - Page 93

The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices the soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and impotent striving, a strength that is ceaselessly broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament. The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul. Sweeping up with the waves of those movements, plunging back with them, the heart thus forgets its own failures and finds solace in an intimate harmony between its own sadness and the sea’s sadness, which merges the sea’s destiny with the destinies of all things.
Marcel Proust
He sought an adventure but didn't find one. He was inexperienced and besides he didn't have too much imagination.
Raymond Queneau
Our imagination is dictated by who we are. (198)
Dai Sijie
There are some catastrophes that a poor writer's pen cannot describe and which he is obliged to leave to the imagination of his readers with a bald statement of the facts.
Alexandre Dumas
The number and richness of man’s signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary…
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
Milan Kundera
Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.
Louis Aragón
Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!
Alfred de Musset
The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.
Marcel Proust
So rapid is the flight of dreams upon the wings of imagination.
Alexandre Dumas
I’d like to have the chance to decide what my life will be like, I think that’s the best present anyone can get. The chance to decide what your life will be like.
Grégoire Delacourt
Life is Not a perpetual climb towards Greatness.For our family, ourselves, and friends,It is but sad Decay, so,Let every girl die after her Hebé (Ἥβη).And every man after his Aristeia(ἀριστεία).
Roman Payne
The past is an obdurate stranger that puts as many marks on us as we attempt to impose on it.
Joanne Harris
Man is free rather than man is freedom.
Jean-Paul Sartre
But this time is ours, and we cannot live hating ourselves
Albert Camus
There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Nothing returns, nothing begins anew; it is never the same thing, and yet it seems always the same. For, if the days never return, every moment brings forth new beings whose destiny it will be to create for themselves, in the course of their lives, the same illusions that have companioned and at times illuminated ours. The fabric is eternal; eternal, the embroidery. A universe dies when we die; another is born when a new creature comes to earth with a new sensibility. If, then, it is very true that nothing begins all over again, it is very just to say, too, that everything continues. One may fearlessly advance the latter statement or the former, according to whether one considers the individual or the blending of generations. From this second point of view, everything is coexistent; the same cause produces contradictory, yet logical effects. All the colors and their shades are printed at a single impression, to form the wonderful image we call life.
Rémy de Gourmont
Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity.
Coco Chanel
We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.
Jean Genet
Man does not steal, he conquers
Alexandre Dumas
When one wishes to play the wit, he sometimes wanders a little from the truth.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
At that period I paid as constant attention to the greater securing of my happiness, to enjoying and judging it, too, as I had always done for the smallest details of my acts; and what is the act of love, itself, if not a moment of passionate attention on the part of the body? Every bliss achieved is a masterpiece; the slightest error turns it awry, and it alters with one touch of doubt; any heaviness detracts from its charm, the least stupidity renders it dull. My own felicity is in no way responsible for those of my imprudences which shattered it later on; in so far as I have acted in harmony with it I have been wise. I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.
Marguerite Yourcenar
How did you get back?' asked Vautrin. 'I walked,' replied Eugene.'I wouldn't like half-pleasures, myself,' observed the tempter. 'I'd want to go there in my own carriage, have my own box, and come back in comfort. All or nothing, that's my motto.''And a very good one,' said Madame Vauquer.
Honoré de Balzac
It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.
Albert Camus
True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.
Emil M. Cioran
Life is as sad as a glass of grenadine.' ... It’s almost that. It is sad. But, at the same time, how a glass of grenadine sparkles!
Mylène Farmer
One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!"And a little later you added:"You know-- one loves the sunet, when one is so sad...""Were you so sad, then?" I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?"But the little prince made no reply.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
As reason returned to me, memory came with it, and I saw that even on the worst days, when I thought I was utterly and completely miserable, I was nevertheless, and nearly all the time, extremely happy. That gave me something to think about. The discovery was not a pleasant one. It seemed to me that I was losing a great deal. I asked myself, wasn't I sad, hadn't I felt my life breaking up? Yes, that had been true; but each minute, when I stayed without moving in a corner of the room, the cool of the night and the stability of the ground made me breathe and rest on gladness.
Maurice Blanchot
Oh! To live alone, always alone, in the midst of the crowd that surrounds me, without a word of love ever coming to gladden my soul, without a friendly hand reaching out to me!
Herculine Barbin
The sense that everything is going wrong has existed in every era, and rightly so since men have found no greater pleasure than in inventing new ways to make each other miserable.
Emil M. Cioran
Nicole had put on weight. This is the effect which, in three cases out of four, unhappiness has upon women. The process of eating guarantees at least the health of the body.
Françoise Sagan
Happy?" asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity and terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life of pleasure.
Honoré de Balzac
Or rather, he was sad because that morning he'd understood that he'd understood nothing, because while he still understood nothing he wasn't sad at all, but now that he'd understood that he'd understood nothing he felt sad, if you follow.
François Lelord
Oh, Mercédès, I have spoken your name with sighs of melancholy, with groans of pain and with the croak of despair. I have spoken it frozen with cold, huddled on the straw of my dungeon. I have spoken it raging with heat and rolling around on the stone floor of my prison. Mercédès, I must have my revenge, because for fourteen years I suffered, fourteen years I wept and cursed. Now, I say to you, Mercédès, I must have my revenge!
Alexandre Dumas
One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.
Simone de Beauvoir
I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me.
Marguerite Duras
For a few seconds Maria did not move, or even breathe, apparently. Then she gave a sorrowful gulp and, like all little girls, even those who speak to fantastical wild boars and mercurial horses, she collapsed in desperate sobs, of the kind that come so easily to a twelve-year-old, and so hard to a person of forty.
Muriel Barbery
Horror is a shock, a time of utter blindness. Horror lacks every hint of beauty. All we can see is the piercing light of an unknown event awaiting us. Sadness, on the other hand, assumes we are in the know... The light of horror thus lost its harshness, and the world was bathed in a gentle, bluish light that actually beautified it.
Milan Kundera
Everything she heard, everything she saw seemed to be in disagreement with her own manner of understanding and feeling. To her, the sun did not appear red enough, the nights pale enough, the skies deep enough. Her fleeting conception of things and beings condemned her fatally to a perversion of her senses, to vagaries of the spirit and left her nothing but the torment of an unachieved longing, the torture of unfulfilled desires.
Octave Mirbeau
When Jean and his mother left Etreuilles, Monsieur Sureau had gathered for them great boxfuls of hawthorn and of snowballs which Madame Santeuil had not the courage to refuse. But, as soon as Jean's uncle had gone home, she threw them away, saying that they already had more than enough in the way of luggage. And then Jean cried because he had been separated from the darling creatures which he would have liked to take with him to Paris, and because of his mother's naughtiness.
Marcel Proust
Sadness had reigned in undisputed sovereignty over his shadowed childhood.
Marcel Proust
I did not know what to say to him. I felt awkward and blundering. I did not know how I could reach him, where I could overtake him and go on hand in hand with him once more.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Being unhappy alone isn't all that much fun, but what's even tougher is playing one's part without forgetting one's lines, coping with other people's compassion, their comments, being there with the right line when they give the cue.
François Maspero
He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.
Gustave Flaubert
Can we account for instinct?' said Monte Cristo. 'Are there not some places where we seem to breathe sadness? — why, we cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections — an idea which carries you back to other times, to other places — which, very likely, have no connection with the present time and place.
Alexandre Dumas
Sadness is a vice.
Gustave Flaubert
The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him... The land of tears is so mysterious.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
We shall never arrive at true meekness by any other way than by humiliating ourselves and by honoring others from the depth of our hearts.
John Calvin
It's all well and good to have profound thoughts on a regular basis, but I think it's not enough. Well, I mean: I'm going to commit suicide and set the house on fire in a few months; obviously I can't assume I have time at my disposal, therefore I have to do something substantial with the little I do have. And above all, I've set myself a little challenge: if you commit suicide, you have to be sure of what you're doing and not burn the house down for nothing. So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, I'd better not miss it, because once you're dead, it's too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, that is really, really dumb.
Muriel Barbery
The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness.
Victor Hugo
Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the heart of men in this double light, has seen nothing, and knows noting of the truth.
Victor Hugo
In our springtime there is no better,there is no worse.Blossoming branches burgeon as the must.Some are long,some are short.'Stay upright.Stay with life.
Cyril Pedrosa
Grief is not very different from illness: in the impetus of its fire it does not recognise lords, it does not fear colleagues, it does not respect or spare anyone, not even it
Eleanor of Aquitaine
Consider in his spiritual martyr this being who lies with closed eyes, dislocated like the victim of a brutal accident who no longer requires care or rescue. Count the stabbing wounds of the hideous disappointment in the human imagination. Auscultate this pensive desert where alternate the rale and the silence. Feel pity for the grief that calls not only for death, but for a disgracied death, and receive, o World, this weight of trampled dream in the paradise with no conscience of your vain eternity !
Anna de Noailles
In our springtime there is no better,there is no worse.Blossoming branches burgeon as they must.Some are long,some are short.Stay upright.Stay with life.
Cyril Pedrosa
People grieve in different ways, some silently, some in anger, some in spite. Rarely does grief bring out the best in people, despite what local historians like to tell you.
Joanne Harris
I used to be a poet.My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.Now I am old...drunk on wine and candle fumes.Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air so as to entertain moths before they go off to die.I used to be a poet and my words were gold.
Roman Payne
... when she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come upon my aunts' old music-master, she was moved to very real grief, and shuddered to think of that other grief, so different in its bitterness, which Mlle. Vinteuil must now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having virtually killed her father.
Marcel Proust
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
Albert Camus