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Quotes by French Authors
"What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me."
"We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full."
"The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched."
"You're lucky. I'm always conscious of myself -in my mind. Painfully conscious."
"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."
"Vivi muito tempo no mundo das pessoas grandes. Vi-as de bem perto. Não fiquei com muito melhor opinião delas."
"Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence."
"We always love those who admire us, but we do not always love those whom we admire."
"Real beauty is to be true to oneself. That's what makes me feel good."
"God transforms, so to speak, this air into words, into various sounds. He makes you understand these various sounds through the modifications by which you are affected."
"We seldom find people ungrateful so long as it is thought we can serve them."
"All creatures are united to God alone in an immediate union. They depend essentially and directly upon Him. Being all alike equally impotent, they cannot be in reciprocal dependence upon one another."
"Tarrou had "lost the match," as he put it. But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing affection and being destined one day to remember it. So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarrou, perhaps, would have called that winning the match."
"Be charitable and indulgent to every one but thyself."
"Humanity lives and always has lived on certain elemental provisions."
"Flowers are so inconsistent!"
"In vain a zealous evangelist with a fely hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: 'God is great and good. Come unto Him.' On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God."
"There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night."
"To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life."
"What I see here is nothing but a shell. What is most important is invisible..."
"The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity."
"It is quite rare for God to provide a great man at the necessary moment to carry out some great deep, which is why when this unusual combination of circumstance does occur, history at once records the name of the chosen one and recommends him to the admiration of posterity."
"In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned."
"People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn't forget it. You become responsible forever for what you've tamed. You're responsible for your rose."
"Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day."
"When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best - that is inspiration."
"There is no road too long to the man who advances deliberately and without undue haste; there are no honors too distant to the man who prepares himself for them with patience."
"If out of all mankind one finds a single friend, he has found something more precious than any treasure, since there is nothing in the world so valuable that it can be compared to a real friend."
"Freedom, "that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm," is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel's mind. There comes a time, however, when justice demands the suspension of freedom. Then terror, on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution. Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence."
"If one has not given everything, one has given nothing."
"Almost always we are bored by people to whom we ourselves are boring."
"One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!"
"Can we ever really know anyone well? Let's just say we often found ourselves in each other's company and neither of us minded."
"A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it."
"To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, & his victories as well."
"In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself."
"In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened."
"Hell is-other people!"
"We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself."
"Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine."
"If a sheep eats bushes does it eat flowers too?a sheep eats whatever it findseven a flower with thorn?even a flower with thorns.then what's the good of thorns?"
"Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them."
"You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen."
"I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on, The windows and the stars illumined, one by one, The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily, And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass; And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, And build me stately palaces by candlelight."
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