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Quotes by French Authors
"Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity the necessity of being the man you are and not another. You are free to be that man but not free to be another."
"Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be..."
"I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know."
"Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days, the region of pure poetry."
"Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will."
"The villages were lighting up, constellations that greeted each other across the dusk. And, at the touch of his finger, his flying-lights flashed back a greeting to them. The earth grew spangled with light signals as each house lit its star, searching the vastness of the night as a lighthouse sweeps the sea. Now every place that sheltered human life was sparkling. And it rejoiced him to enter into this one night with a measured slowness, as into an anchorage."
"One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us."
"A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance."
"Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then."
"Knowing God without knowing our wretchedness leads to pride. Knowing our wretchedness without knowing God leads to despair. Knowing Jesus Christ is the middle course, because in him we find both God and our wretchedness."
"Life is the sum of all your choices."
"I cannot think that man is meant to find happiness so easily! Happiness is like one of those palaces on an enchanted island, its gates guarded by dragons. One must fight to gain it; and, in truth, I do not know what I have done to deserve the good fortune of becoming Mercedes’ husband."
"Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."
"Money never prevented anyone from being happy or unhappy."
"Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes murder."
"If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers..."
"But in the machine of today we forget that motors are whirring: the motor, finally, has come to fulfill its function, which is to whirr as a heart beats - and we give no thought to the beating of our heart. Thus, precisely because it is perfect the machine dissembles its own existence instead of forcing itself upon our notice."
"I'm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country, that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black, has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man."
"I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances."
"Ability is of little account without opportunity."
"The natural heat, say the good-fellows,first seats itself in the feet: that concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middleregion, where it makes a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; towards the end, like a vapor that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress."
"Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also contains hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman's body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularizes it."
"He was thinking alone, and seriously racking his brain to find a direction for this single force four times multiplied, with which he did not doubt, as with the lever for which Archimedes sought, they should succeed in moving the world, when some one tapped gently at his door."
"To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself."
"Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them."
"If Aliosha had come to the conclusion that neither God nor immortality existed, he would immediately have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not only a question of the working classes; it is above all, in its contemporary incarnation, a question of atheism, a question of the tower of Babel, which is constructed without God's help, not to reach to the heavens, but to bring the heavens down to earth."
"Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death."
"He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed."
"Go and have another look at the roses. And you will understand that yours is indeed unique in all the world."
"This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have been difficult for me to understand. It was a very long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama, "Go with the boy. The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me."
"It is only in our decisions that we are important."
"The first virtue in a soldier is endurance of fatigue courage is only the second virtue."
"Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable."
"Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies."
"A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears."
"The majority is the best way because it is visible and has strength to make itself obeyed. Yet it is the opinion of the least able."
"'Men have forgotten this truth,' said the fox. 'But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.'"
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