top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by French Authors
"Any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil."
"He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool."
"There is do much sttuborn hope in a human heart."
"The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words."
"Tenderness is the repose of passion."
"But as the Pope has a long arm, which might reach me in France, I have gone a little out of the way to tell him the plain truths contained in these pages."
"Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas."
"Self - love is the greatest of all flatterers."
"Lesbians and gays... they still have to fight, even inside. It's not that simple, even if they seem to be accepted."
"One can't relive one's life. Forgiveness is not what's difficult; one's always too ready to forgive. And it does no good, that's obvious."
"The manner of giving is worth more than the gift."
"I have an interest in spirituality, and it opens up so many different areas of Indian life."
"I agreed on condition that we found a completely new concept that had nothing to do with the latest books."
"I defy anyone - and I have said this to the Germans - to build a solid, articulated, and viable Europe without France's consent."
"Uncertainty is the worst of all evils until the moment when reality makes us regret uncertainty."
"All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism."
"Every other knowledge is harmful to him who does not have knowledge of goodness."
"Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment."
"Musical ideas sprang to my mind like a flight of butterflies, and all I had to do was to stretch out my hand to catch them."
"When my friends lack an eye I look at them in profile."
"The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone."
"Everything we know by heart enriches us and helps us find ourselves. If it should get in the way of finding ourselves, it is because we have no personality."
"There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness."
"It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for."
"Knowing what I know of love, I hang back because I don't like to lie to myself."
"When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before."
"A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers."
"What is perfectly true is perfectly witty."
"Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves."
"Everybody knows that the great reversed triangle of land, with its base in the north and its apex in the south, which is called India, embraces fourteen hundred thousand square miles, upon which is spread unequally a population of one hundred and eighty millions of souls."
"Let us give Nature a chance, she knows her business better than we do."
"The human race is governed by its imagination."
bottom of page