top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by French Authors
"If you do two versions of a film, they should be identical. With the same frames and settings."
"The three great moments of my life had to be the concerts of Ellington in 1938, Dizzy in '48, and Ella in '52."
"There was a strange atmosphere on the set because we were filming in this large house, which was used for troubled children. You'd go in and find walls had been burnt down. The building was charged with this history and it stayed with us throughout the filming."
"Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses."
"As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it."
"Whether democracy or aristocracy is the better form of government constitutes a very difficult question. But, clearly, democracy inconveniences one person while aristocracy oppresses another. That is a truth which establishes itself and precludes any discussion: you are rich and I am poor."
"He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of twenty-seven days, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon he was clothed in the red cassock. All that had constituted his life, even to his name, was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601."
"The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose not his individuality but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him."
"Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves."
"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst."
"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."
"The army is the true nobility of our country."
"Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear."
"If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits oneself, life would be unbearable."
"Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis."
"Extreme boredom provides its own antidote."
"Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor."
"Nothing need be apprehended from this miserable adventurer."
"I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist."
"What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying."
"Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests."
"If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance."
"We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end."
"The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others."
"It is from the womb of art that criticism was born."
"I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity."
"If we resist our passions, it is more due to their weakness than our strength."
"France cannot be destroyed. She is an old country who, despite her misfortunes, has, and always will have, thanks to her past, a tremendous prestige in the world, whatever the fate inflicted upon her."
"The Nautilus was piercing the water with its sharp spur, after having accomplished nearly ten thousand leagues in three months and a half, a distance greater than the great circle of the earth. Where were we going now, and what was reserved for the future?"
"I had never even thought I'd be an actress - I was supposed to be a lawyer. But the motivation is the same: when you act, you defend a role; you have to be convincing. It's the same career."
"I am sure that the sad days and happenings were rare, and that I lived the joyous and careless life of other children; but just because the happy days were so habitual to me they made no impression upon my mind, and I can no longer recall them."
bottom of page