Quotes by French Authors - Page 98

It was a time I slept in many rooms, called myself by many names. I wandered through the quarters of the city like alluvium wanders the river banks. I knew every kind of joy, ascents of every hue. Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.
Roman Payne
Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.
Romain Gary
All I wanted was to be loved for myself." (Erik)
Gaston Leroux
He did not seek to assume the mantle of Elijah, to shed a light of the future upon the misty turmoil of events or resolve the prevailing light into a single flame; there was in him nothing of the prophet or the mystic. He was a simple soul who loved, and that was all.
Victor Hugo
To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.
Jean-Paul Sartre
If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.
Denis Diderot
I admire those believers who speak of such things with the same aplomb as if the'd just split a beer with God in the cabin next door.
Sylvain Tesson
The probability of an event is the reason we have to believe that it has taken place, or that it will take place.The measure of the probability of an event is the ratio of the number of cases favourable to that event, to the total number of cases favourable or contrary, and all equally possible.
Siméon Denis Poisson
I tried to believe in God, but I confess to you that God meant nothing in my life, and that in my secret heart I too felt a void where my childhood faith had been. But probably this feeling belongs only to individuals in transition. The grandchildren of these pessimists will frolic in the freedom of their lives, and have more happiness than poor Christians darkened with fear of Hell.
Voltaire
True love is like ghosts which many believe in, but few have seen.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Loving is half of believing.
Victor Hugo
But his doubts were again coming back to him; when you needed a miracle to gain belief, it means that you are incapable of believing. There is no need for the Almighty to prove His existence.
Émile Zola
Though one believes in nothing, there are moments in life when one accepts the religion of the temple nearest at hand.
Victor Hugo
What man seeks, to the point of anguish, in his gods, in his art, in his science, is meaning. He cannot bear the void. He pours meaning on events like salt on his food.
François Jacob
Do not believe anything merely because you are told it is so, because others believe it, because it comes from Tradition, or because you have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect. Believe, take for your doctrine, and hold true to that, which, after serious investigation, seems to you to further the welfare of all beings. (47)
Jean-Yves Leloup
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
Albert Camus
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.
Arthur Rimbaud
She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.
Jean-Paul Sartre
He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, - ‘Wait and hope.’ – Your friend, Edmond Dantes, Count of Monte Cristo. The eyes of both were fixed on the spot indicated by the sailor, and on the blue-line separating the sky from the Mediterranean Sea, they perceived a large white sail.
Alexandre Dumas
Was she acting entirely consciously? No: women are always sincere, even in the midst of their most shocking duplicities, because it is always some natural emotion which dominates them. Perhaps, having given this young man such a hold on her, by having openly demonstrated her affection for him, Delphine was merely responding to a sense of personal dignity, which led her either to revoke any concessions she might have made or, at least, to enjoy suspending them. Even at the very moment when passion seizes her, it is perfectly natural for a Parisian woman to delay her final fall, as a way of testing the heart of the man into whose hands she is about to deliver herself and her future!
Honoré de Balzac
They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past... They wanted to compel him to cast his life away and become a shadow, a man without past, an actor without a role, and turn even his castaway life, even the role the actor had abandoned, into a shadow. Having turned him into a shadow, they would let him live.
Milan Kundera
They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about,but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy it or repaint it. We want to be the masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history.
Milan Kundera
You can only predict things after they have happened.
Eugène Ionesco
Lastly, and doubtless always, but particularly at the end of the last century, certain scholars considered that since the appearances on our scale were finally the only important ones for us, there was no point in seeking what might exist in an inaccessible domain. I find it very difficult to understand this point of view since what is inaccessible today may become accessible tomorrow (as has happened by the invention of the microscope), and also because coherent assumptions on what is still invisible may increase our understanding of the visible.
Jean Baptiste Perrin
The future of mankind is going to be decided within the next two generations, and there are two absolute requisites: We must aim at a stable-state society [with limited population growth] and the destruction of nuclear stockpiles. … Otherwise I don't see how we can survive much later than 2050.
Jacques Monod
Where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is the junction between those who think and those who suffer; this barricade is made neither of paving stones, nor of timbers, nor of iron; it is made of two mounds, a mound of ideas and a mound of sorrows. Here misery encounters the ideal. Here day embraces night, and says: I will die with you and you will be born again with me. From the heavy embrace of all desolations springs faith. Sufferings bring their agony here, and ideas their immortality. This agony and immortality will mingle and make up our death.Brothers, whoever dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a grave illuminated by the dawn.
Victor Hugo
Doing his utmost, deploying all his energy, a young man setting out from zero can wind up after ten years somewhere below where he started.
Honoré de Balzac
Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it's the present that counts. Invoking posterity is like making speeches to worms.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
If we wish to foresee the future of mathematics, our proper course is to study the history and present condition of the science.
Henri Poincaré
I saw this moment as attached by threads to eternity and woven between all the other braided moments of my past and my future.
Roman Payne
As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past.
Marcel Proust
He knew that, from now on, every day would be alike, that they would all bring the same sufferings. And he saw the weeks, the months, the years that awaited him, gloomy and implacable, coming one after the other, falling on him and suffocating him bit by bit. When the future is without hope, the present takes on a vile, bitter taste.
Émile Zola
I do not want to recollect. I should be afraid of preventing the future and of allowing the past to encroach on me. It is out of the utter forgetfulness of yesterday that I create every new hour's freshness. It is never enough for me to have been happy. I do not believe in dead things and cannot distinguish between being no more and never having been.
André Gide
The present is a transitory existence which is made in order to be abolished: it retrieves itself only by transcending itself toward the permanence of future being; it is only as an instrument, as a means, it is only by it's efficacy with regard to the coming of the future that the present is validly realized: reduced to itself it is nothing , one may dispose of it as he pleases.
Simone de Beauvoir
Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences—all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it.
Albert Camus
Because our needs are our little daily dreams The little things to be done that project us into tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the future; trivial things that we plan to buy next week, allowing us to think that next week we'll still be alive.
Grégoire Delacourt
No prince, no success filled her dreams: only time spread out before her to spend as she chose, a time of contemplation which offered her refuge.
Delphine de Vigan
The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our compassion between two infinities of happiness and peace.
Michel Houellebecq
Everyone is wrong about the future.
Milan Kundera
If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?
Milan Kundera
My friend, let us enjoy the present and give no thought to the evils of the future.
Alexandre Dumas
Purgatory surpasses heaven and hell in poetry, because it represents a future and the others do not.
Francois Rene De Chateaubriand
The regrets are like yesterday: they announce only the future. (Les regrets sont comme hier: - Ils n'annoncent que le futur)
Charles de Leusse
The past is bound to be fragmentary, bound to be reconstructed, bound to be reinvented. It serves only to collect the truths of today. If our present is the child of the past, our past is the child of the present. And the future will be the harvester of our bastard offspring.
Amin Maalouf
If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.
Blaise Pascal
The man of the future will be young or he will not be.
Régis Debray
I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.
Hugo Cabret
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
Emil M. Cioran
It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.
Voltaire
It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!
André Breton
Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.
André Breton
People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Menacing lines of black tomorrows on the horizon.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
The world is going to become bloody stupid and from now on will be a very boring place. We’re lucky to be living now.
Gustave Flaubert
Night is mine, together with a substantial part of the future.
Nelly Kaplan
I don't know where I'm going to be in three years. Because I have the feeling that the future is so full of possibilities, to stop being an actress, to do something else... for me, the future is just a huge bunch of discoveries.
Audrey Tautou
Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.
Albert Camus
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.
Marc Chagall
To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
Albert Camus