Quotes by French Authors - Page 95

Have you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private, personal solitude that surrounds me, I have turned to you? All the memories of my youth speak to me as I walk, just as the sea shells crunch under my feet on the beach. The crash of every wave awakens far-distant reverberations within me... I hear the rumble of bygone days, and in my mind the whole endless series of old passions surges forward like the billows. I remember my spasms, my sorrows, gusts of desire that whistled like wind in the rigging, and vast vague longings that swirled in the dark like a flock of wild gulls in a stormcloud... On whom should I lean, if not on you? My weary mind turns for refreshment to the thought of you as a dusty traveler might sink onto a soft and grassy bank...
Gustave Flaubert
...we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don't want to improve ourselves and be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves.
Albert Camus
That figure stood for a long time wholly in the light; this arose from a certain legendary dimness evolved by the majority of heroes, and which always veils the truth for a longer or shorter time; but to-day history and daylight have arrived.That light called history is pitiless; it possesses this peculiar and divine quality, that, pure light as it is, and precisely because it is wholly light, it often casts a shadow in places where people had hitherto beheld rays; from the same man it constructs two different phantoms, and the one attacks the other and executes justice on it, and the shadows of the despot contend with the brilliancy of the leader. Hence arises a truer measure in the definitive judgments of nations. Babylon violated lessens Alexander, Rome enchained lessens Caesar, Jerusalem murdered lessens Titus, tyranny follows the tyrant. It is a misfortune for a man to leave behind him the night which bears his form.
Victor Hugo
ZENITHNOON beats outon its solar anvilthe rays of light
Sonia Delaunay
ContrastsThe windows of my poetry are wide open on the boulevards and in the shop windowsShineThe precious stones of lightListen to the violins of the limousines and the xylophones of the linotypesThe sketcher washes with the hand-towel of the skyAll is color spotsAnd the hats of the women passing by are comets in the conflagration of the eveningUnity There's no more unityAll the clocks now read midnight after being set back ten minutesThere's no more time.There's no more money.In the ChamberThey are spoiling the marvelous elements of raw material("Contrasts")
Blaise Cendrars
...And we left the lightfor the night of the street
Pierre Albert-Birot
Desire, desire which knows, we draw no advantage from our shadows except from some veritable sovereignties accompanied by invisible flames, invisible chains, which, coming to light, step after step, cause us to shine.
René Char
On the edge of a tropical ocean, in a thousand reflections of the silver light of an invisible moon, among undulations of restless waters, ceaselessly changing...Among silent breakers, the tremors of the shining surface, in the swift flux and reflux martyrizing the patches of light, in the rendings of luminous loops and arcs, and lines, in the occultations and reappearances of dancing bursts of light being decomposed, recomposed, contracted, spread out, only to be re-distributed once more before me, with me, within me, drowned, and unendurably buffeted, my calm violated a thousand times by the tongues of infinity, oscillating, sinusoidally overrun by the multitude of liquid lines. enormous with a thousand folds, I was and I was not, I was caught, I was lost, I was in a state of complete ubiquity. The thousands upon thousands of rustlings were my own thousand shatterings.
Henri Michaux
From the pavement, I could see the window of Albertine’s room, that window, formerly quite black, at night, when she was not staying in the house, which the electric light inside, dissected by the slats of the shutters, striped from top to bottom with parallel bars of gold.
Marcel Proust
I picture the vast realm of the sciences as an immense landscape scattered with patches of dark and light. The goal towards which we must work is either to extend the boundaries of the patches of light, or to increase their number. One of these tasks falls to the creative genius; the other requires a sort of sagacity combined with perfectionism.
Denis Diderot
It’s not the light that’s attracting me, but the darkness that’s driving me on.
Julien Torma
Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting them on the table in the guise of candles?
Victor Hugo
Good night! Good night!Far flies the light;But still God's loveShall shine above,Making all bright,Good night! Good night!
Victor Hugo
The villages were lighting up, constellations that greeted each other across the dusk. And, at the touch of his finger, his flying-lights flashed back a greeting to them. The earth grew spangled with light signals as each house lit its star, searching the vastness of the night as a lighthouse sweeps the sea. Now every place that sheltered human life was sparkling. And it rejoiced him to enter into this one night with a measured slowness, as into an anchorage.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Make thought a whirlwind.
Victor Hugo
Her hair was full of lights
Anaïs Nin
In such blue beauty you sense the darkness into which the light will soon fall, and in this conjugal life of blue and black you find the one lesson of things that suits you, the proof of a certain excellence in this life where everything is given to us, every instant, blue with black, strength with hurt.
Christian Bobin
It is as if the angels had just done their laundry and, owning no other wealth than love, they are always clothed in the same light, worn transparent from so many washings.
Christian Bobin
A painter is someone who wipes the windowpane between the world and us with light, with a rag made of light, soaked in silence.
Christian Bobin
There are even some stars so remote that their light will reach the Earth only when Earth itself is a dead planet, as they themselves are dead, so that the living Earth will never be visited by that forlorn ray of light, without a living source, without a living destination. Often on fine nights when the park of this establishment is vacant, I amuse myself with this marvelous instrument (telescope). I go upstairs, walk across the grass, sit on a bench in the Avenue of Oaks – and there, in my solitude, I enjoy the pleasure of weighing the rays of dead stars.
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Love is not consolation. It is light.
Simone Weil
Compulsive reading relieves the anxiety that comes from tramping through the forest of meditation in search of clearings.
Sylvain Tesson
Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences, or of the more elevated departments of science, than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree. It completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are.
Matthieu Ricard
Nothing is born, nothing dies.
Antoine Lavoisier
He is not admiring the colours of the earth and sky, the marks of the wind on the sea, the gilded clouds of twilight; they are the objects of his meditation.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Between the desolate earth and the colorless sky appeared an Image of the ungrateful world in which, for the first time, he came to himself at last. On this earth, restored to the despair of innocence, a traveler lost in a primitive world, he regained contact, and with his list pressed to his chest, his face flattened against the glass, he calculated his hunger for himself and for the certainty of the splendors dormant within him. He wanted to crush himself into that mud, to reenter the earth by immersing himself in that clay, to stand on that limitless plain covered with dirt, stretching his arms to the sooty sponge of the sky, as though confronting the superb and despairing symbol of life itself, to affirm his solidarity with the world at its worst, to declare himself life's accomplice even in its thanklessness and its filth. Then the great impulse that had sustained him collapsed for the first time since he left Prague. Mersault pressed his tears and his lips against the cold pane. Again the glass blurred, the landscape disappeared.
Albert Camus
Meditation is a powerful and full study as can effectually taste and employ themselves.
Michel de Montaigne
People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that, while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.
Victor Hugo
We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our school masters, and one from the world. The third contradicts all that the first two teach us.
Montesquieu
They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
Come to the edge, He said.They said: We are afraid.Come to the edge, He said.They came. He pushed them,And they flew . . ."— Guillaume ApollinairetFrench poet
Guillaume Apollinaire
When we want to awaken a thought in anyone, what are the means at our disposal? One only, to produce in him by word and sign states of sensibility and of imagination, emotion and memory in which he will discover our idea and make it his own.
Antonin Sertillanges
Now I realized that life supplies us with everything we need for the journey. Everything I had acquired either actively or passively, everything I had learned either voluntarily or by osmosis, was coming back to me as the real riches of my life, even though I had lost everything.
Ingrid Betancourt
had no need of a guide to learn ignorance
Voltaire
We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorours and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours.
Marcel Proust
So you're giving up? That's it? Okay, okay. We'll leave you alone, Quasimodo. We just thought, maybe you're made up of something much stronger.
Victor Hugo
This was the first time I thought of S— that day. Her music was beautiful, her voice was beautiful, her body was beautiful. Even the dirty little pads of her feet were beautiful. I cursed myself then. For once, heaven had sent me Beauty in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry down. How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death?
Roman Payne
I have at least the whole of my life to answer a question: Who am I? And who is the other? A gust of wind at dawn? A motionless landscape? A trembling leaf? A coil of white smoke above a mountain? I write all these words and I hear the wind, not outside, but inside my head. A strong wind, it rattles the shutters through which I enter the dream.
Tahar ben Jelloun
The important thing was that we were alive...
Henri Charrière
Without doubt, it is a delightful harmony when doing and saying go together.
Michel de Montaigne
I am moving the rudder, shifting the course of my life. I have not thought of it this way before, but that is what I am doing. Taking my fate into my own hands, turning dreams into reality. And there is nothing more sacred or precious than that. To choose a direction: but how often do we miss the signposts?
Carol Drinkwater
The fear of death never left me; I couldn't get used to the thought; I would still sometimes shake and weep with terror. By contrast, the fact of existence here and now sometimes took on a glorious splendour.
Simone de Beauvoir
Rather than recount his life as he has lived it, he must live his life as he will recount it.
André Gide
True prayer is only another name for the love of God. Its excellence does not consist in the multitude of our words; for our Father knoweth what things we have need of before we ask Him. The true prayer is that of the heart, and the heart prays only for what it desires. To pray, then is to desire -- but to desire what God would have us desire. He who asks what he does not from the bottom of his heart desire, is mistaken in thinking that he prays.
François Fénelon
When I listen to you, Godwhen I do what you ask me to,I am like a treeplanted by a river,a tree full of fruitwith leaves that are always green. Ps 1(paraphrased)
Marie-Hélène Delval
What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky.
Victor Hugo
Now you are walking in Paris all alone in the crowdAs herds of bellowing buses drive byLove's anguish tightens your throatAs if you were never to be loved againIf you lived in the old days you would enter a monasteryYou are ashamed when you discover yourself reciting a prayerYou make fun of yourself and like the fire of Hell your laughter cracklesThe sparks of your laugh gild the depths of your lifeIt's a painting hanging in a dark museumAnd sometimes you go and look at it close up
Guillaume Apollinaire
For a few moments, raising his arms desperately, the Reverend Mouret implored Heaven. His shoulder-blades cracked, with such fantastic force did he pray. But soon enough his arms fell to his sides, his hopes abashed. From heaven came one of those silences utterly void of hope known to the devout.
Émile Zola
The ascetic remembrance of death is opposed to akedia, to anxiety, to depression, and becomes a powerful reminder of eternity, its joyful nostalgia.
Paul Evdokimov
Prayer unaccompanied by perseverance leads to no result.
John Calvin
He regards it as the highest insult for the wicked to boast of His covenant while profaning His sacred Name by their whole lives.
John Calvin
Men in prayer give greater license to their unlawful desires than if they were telling jocular tales among their equals.
John Calvin
He who neglects to pray alone and in private, however assiduously he frequents public meetings, there gives his prayers to the wind.
John Calvin
The difficulties of life do not have to be unbearable. It is the way we look at them - through faith or unbelief - that makes them seem so. We must be convinced that our Father is full of love for us and that He only permits trials to come our way for our own good.Let us occupy ourselves entirely in knowing God. The more we know Him, the more we will desire to know Him. As love increases with knowledge, the more we know God, the more we will truly love Him. We will learn to love Him equally in times of distress or in times of great joy.
Brother Lawrence
When the mind, for want of being sufficiently reduced by recollection at our first engaging in devotion, has contracted certain bad habits of wandering and dissipation, they are difficult to overcome, and commonly draw us, even against our wills, to the things of the earth.I believe one remedy for this is to confess our faults, and to humble ourselves before God. I do not advise you to use multiplicity of words in prayer: many words and long discourses being often the occasions of wandering. Hold yourself in prayer before God, like a dumb or paralytic beggar at a rich man's gate. Let it be your business to keep your mind in the presence of the Lord. If it sometimes wander and withdraw itself from Him, do not much disquiet yourself for that: trouble and disquiet serve rather to distract the mind than to re-collect it: the will must bring it back in tranquility. If you persevere in this manner, God will have pity on you.
Brother Lawrence
Art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
May we be prepared, whatever happens, rather to undergo a hundred deaths than to turn aside from the profession of true piety, in which we know our safety to be laid up. And may we so glorify thy name as to be partakers of that glory which has been acquired for us through the blood of thine only-begotten Son. Amen.
John Calvin
I cannot come to thee but by thee, I never come from thee without thee
Bernard
Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of creation. It makes history possible.
Jacques Ellul