Quotes by French Authors - Page 99

It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.
Albert Camus
We must not imitate that which we seek to create.
Georges Braque
What a face this girl possessed!—Could I neither die then nor gaze at her face every day, I would need to recreate it through painting or sculpture, or through fatherhood, until a second such face could be born.
Roman Payne
Is there a recipe for making beauty? The schools give recipes, but they do not beget works that make people exclaim: " How beautiful that is!
Paul Gauguin
poetry’s favourite moment is when one loses one’s footing because of a landslide or seismic shaking of thought
Michel Leiris
The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.
Blaise Pascal
Haven't I told you scores of times, that you're always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the heights? That's something you don't understand, and can't understand until you've gone through it yourself. You're still at the state of unlimited illusions, when a good, strong pair of legs makes the hardest road look short, and you've such a mighty appetite for glory that the tiniest crumb of success tastes delightfully sweet. You're prepared for a feast, you're going to satisfy your ambition at last, you feel it's within reach and you don't care if you give the skin off your back to get it! And then, the heights are scaled, the summits reached, and you've got to stay there. That's when the torture begins; you've drunk your excitement to the dregs and found it all too short and even rather bitter, and you wonder whether it was really worth the struggle. From that point there is no more unknown to explore, no new sensations to experience. Pride has had its brief portion of celebrity; you know that your best has been given and you're surprised it hasn't brought a keener sense of satisfaction. From that moment the horizon starts to empty of all hopes that once attracted you towards it. There's nothing to look forward to but death. But in spite of that you cling on, you don't want to feel you're played out, you persist in trying to produce something, like old men persist in trying to make love, with painful, humiliating results. ... If only we could have the courage to hang ourselves in front of our last masterpiece!
Émile Zola
The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it's robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It's like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs, and destroys the entire body in time. No sooner am I out of bed in the morning than work clamps down on me and pins me to my desk before I've even had a breath of fresh air. It follows me to lunch and I find myself chewing over sentences as I'm chewing my food. It goes with me when I go out, eats out of my plate at dinner and shares my pillow in bed at night. It's so extremely merciless that once the process of creation is started, it's impossible for me to stop it, and it goes on growing and working even when I'm asleep. ... Outside that, nothing, nobody exists.
Émile Zola
The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.
Maurice Blanchot
Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance...
Edgar Degas
Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.
Henri Bergson
To fight adversity, to improvise, to solve problems, and to save the coup, I had gathered all my senses into unusual configurations, which made me grow wild and enhanced my perceptions.
Philippe Petit
All the while that Jean was listening to him, he was vaguely conscious that what gives literature its reality is the result of work accomplished by the human spirit, no matter what the material facts that may have stimulated it (a walk, a night of love, a social drama), of a sort of discovery in the world of the spirit, of the emotions, made by the human intelligence, so that the value of a book is never in the material presented by the writer, but in the nature of the operation he performs upon it.
Marcel Proust
We mustn't be afraid of inventing anything...Everething there is in us exists in nature. After all, we're part of nature. If it resembles nature, that's fine. If it doesn't, what of it? When man wanted to invent something as useful as the human foot, he invented the wheel, which he used to transport himself and his burdens. The fact that the wheel doesn't have the slightest resemblance to the human foot is hardly a criticism of it.
Françoise Gilot
Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can’t stiffen up enough to create them.
Gustave Flaubert
Sometimes I don’t understand why my arms don’t drop from my body with fatigue, why my brain doesn’t melt away. I am leading an austere life, stripped of all external pleasure, and am sustained only by a kind of permanent frenzy, which sometimes makes me weep tears of impotence but never abates. I love my work with a love that is frantic and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly. Sometimes, when I am empty, when words don’t come, when I find I haven’t written a single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed, bogged down in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride that makes me pant after a chimera. A quarter of an hour later, everything has changed; my heart is pounding with joy.
Gustave Flaubert
The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds
Alfred de Vigny
The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer
Alfred de Musset
On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
Gustave Flaubert
Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial by nature?
Maurice Ravel
After joyfully working each morning, I would leave off around midday to challenge myself to a footrace. Speeding along the sunny paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg, ideas would breed like aphids in my head—for creative invention is easy and sublime when air cycles quickly through the lungs and the body is busy at noble tasks.
Roman Payne
Uncertainty is a quality to be cherished, therefore – if not for it, who would dare to undertake anything?
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher.
Frédéric Chopin
If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!
Antoine De Saint Exupery
look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you...
Colette
Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.
Charles Baudelaire
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.
Anaïs Nin
Man is this plural and collective unity in which the unity of destination and the differences of destinies are to be understood through each other.
Paul Ricœur
He laid the foundation of a universal government. His law was one for all. Equal justice and love for everyone.
George Rivorie
Those things: Mystery, Fate, and Enchantment... they are things that young people offer us as soon as we get close to them. And if we’re not careful, we can be seduced by, and drawn back into, the youthful world the young preside over.
Roman Payne
since destiny always rings three times...
Muriel Barbery
Without knowing why or how, I found myself in love with this strange Wanderess. Maybe I was just in love with the dream she was selling me: a life of destiny and fate; as my own life up until we met had been so void of enchantment. Those things: mystery, fate, enchantment... they are things that young people offer us as soon as we get close to them. And if we're not careful, we can be seduced by, and drawn back into, the youthful world they preside over.
Roman Payne
That it was no doubt a dark hour, but that he should get through it; that after all he held his destiny, evil as it might be, in his own hand; that he was master of it. He clung to that thought.
Victor Hugo
The art of statemanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
You can no more look destiny in the face than you can look at the sun, and yet destiny is grey
Henri Barbusse
The wisdom of man can only produce works on a human level. Only the Wisdom of God can realize things divine, and it is to divine heights that it destines us.
Father Jacques Philippe
If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.
Albert Camus
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
Albert Camus
​The destiny of nations depends upon the manner in which they feed themselves.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
I, the ordinary restless child, the plain adolescent, the commoner who had been a nun twice, would prove to be a Daughter of Heaven.
Shan Sa
My position at the Palace is our one opportunity. Have confidence in my destiny. Do not weep.
Shan Sa
We have a thousand possible, but only one is the target. (Nous avons mille possibles, - Mais un seul est la cible)
Charles de Leusse
There comes a moment when the image of our life parts company with the life itself, stands free, and, little by little, begins to rule us. Already in The Joke: “I came to realize that there was no power capable of changing the image of my person lodged somewhere in the supreme court of human destinies; that this image (even though it bore no resemblance to me) was much more real than my actual self; that I was its shadow and not it mine; that I had no right to accuse it of bearing no resemblance to me, but rather that it was I who was guilty of the nonresemblance; and that the nonresemblance was my cross, which I could not unload on anyone else, which was mine alone to bear.”And in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “Destiny has no intention of lifting a finger for Mirek (for his happiness, his security, his good spirits, his health), whereas Mirek is ready to do everything for his destiny (for its grandeur, its clarity, its beauty, its style, its intelligible meaning). He felt responsible for his destiny, but his destiny did not feel responsible for him.
Milan Kundera
I was convinced that I would be, that I was already, one in a million.
Simone de Beauvoir
Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up.
Simone de Beauvoir
A person's destiny often ends before his death.
Milan Kundera
The future is not a scenario written, which we only have to act out; it is a work which we have to create.
Roger Garaudy
The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.
Jacques Monod
No destiny attacks us from outside. But, within him, man bears his fate and there comes a moment when he knows himself vulnerable; and then, as in a vertigo, blunder upon blunder lures him.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Little faults become great, and even monstrous in our eyes, in proportion as the pure light of God increases in us; just as the sun in rising, reveals the true dimensions of objects which were dimly and confusedly discovered during the night.
François Fénelon
It’s not that we have to leave this life one day, it's how many things we have to leave all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, wine, summertime, drunkenness, and the physics of falling leaves, clothing, myrrh, perfumed hair, flirting friends, two strangers' glance; the reflection of the moon, with words like, 'Soon' ... 'do you want me?' ... '...to lie enlaced' ... 'and sleep entwined' thinking ahead, with thoughts behind...?' Ô, Why!Why can’t we leave this life slowly?
Roman Payne
If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.
Albert Camus
Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives.
Anaïs Nin
When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street... it is all the same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death… And they should! ...For they are 'in' life.
Roman Payne
I Drink. I Burn. I Dream.And Sometimes, I tell Stories !
Hélène Cixous
He lives happy and master of himself who can say as each day passes on, "I have lived.
Michel de Montaigne
Yes, one can wager war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man, or merely say evil of one’s neighbor while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.
Albert Camus
Love reduces the complexity of living. It amazes me that when Henry walks towards the cafe table where I wait for him, or opens the gate to our house, the sight of him is sufficient to exult me. No letter from anyone, even in praise of my book, can stir me as much as a note from him.
Anaïs Nin
We live in that grave, in those clothes, in the pressure between nothing and everything, we live by perpetual movement from place to place but we want oh we so much want to escape to say it all to come home at last to the right place our rightful place our rightful space. As if that was possible.
Gabriel Josipovici