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Quotes by French Authors
"I always think about what I missed, and I think that was my driving force - never be satisfied with what I've done."
"It takes a very deep-rooted opinion to survive unexpressed."
"The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity."
"There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable."
"Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price."
"Few people know how to be old."
"Hatred, for the man who is not engaged in it, is a little like the odor of garlic for one who hasn't eaten any."
"There would probably be less of a frenzy among the French public."
"But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny."
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm."
"For me football is more about making the right pass at the right time."
"To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter."
"Private passions tire and exhaust themselves, public ones never."
"The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind."
"Here, I am looking for a document issued by a public attorney. I don't find. He is accused by the political leaders of the coalition, by his enemies, who said that he is guilty. That he deserves to be killed."
"Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure my stuttering. Well, I tried it, and during a scene I swallowed the pebble. That was the end of that."
"Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light."
"I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty."
"Augustine does not disagree with this when he teaches that it is a faculty of the reason and the will to choose good with the assistance of grace; evil, when grace is absent."
"If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye."
"All the blessings we enjoy are Divine deposits, committed to our trust on this condition, that they should be dispensed for the benefit of our neighbors."
"I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve."
"The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism."
"If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature, In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuses behind us, no justification before us. We are alone with no excuses.This is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet in other respects is free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."
"The conductor must breathe life into the score. It is you and you alone who must expose it to the understanding, reveal the hidden jewel to the sun at the most flattering angles."
"The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom."
"Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half."
"A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous."
"The greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one's opportunities and make the most of one's resources."
"What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself."
"The striking thing about the Precious Blood is the bond it establishes between love and suffering in our experience, a bond that has become so close that we have come to think of suffering accepted with joy as the most authentic sign of love with any depth at all."
"If people did not compliment one another there would be little society."
"We are all of us richer than we think we are."
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