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Quotes by French Authors
"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."
"The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body; after all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind, and they are in continual danger of breaking the skin and bursting out again."
"'Men have forgotten this truth,' said the fox. 'But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.'"
"If the work is poor, the public taste will soon do it justice. And the author, reaping neither glory nor fortune, will learn by hard experience how to correct his mistakes."
"Every man ought to say to himself, "Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?"
"We have given most of Europe to Hitler. Let us try to hold on to what we have got left."
"Obstinacy and heat in sticking to one's opinions is the surest proof of stupidity. Is there anything so cocksure so immovable so disdainful so contemplative so solemn and serious as an ass?"
"Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn't have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn't have to be a walk during which you'll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don't find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be."
"To be a man is to feel that one's own stone contributes to building the edifice of the world."
"The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable."
"True eloquence consists of saying all that should be said and that only."
"The phenomenon develops calmly, but it is invisible, unstoppable. One feels, one sees it born and grow steadily; and it is not in one's power to either hasten or slow it down."
"I am strangely tired, not from having talked so much but at the mere thought of what I still have to say."
"Two people can form a community by excluding a third."
"Moral wounds have this peculiarity - they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart."
"The king! I thought he was philosopher enough to allow that there was no murder in politics. In politics, my dear fellow, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but ideas - no feelings, but interests; in politics we do not kill a man, we only remove an obstacle, that is all."
"A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour, light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon."
"Many people think that virtue consists of severity towards others."
"Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy."
"There are fathers who do not love their children there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson."
"The fox is answering the Little Prince's question. What does that mean . . . tame? asks the Little Prince. Itmeans to establish ties. One only understands the things that one tames. Men have no more time to understand anything, they buy things all ready made at the shops, but there is no shop anywhere one can buy friendship."
"The first crime was mine: I committed it when I made man mortal. Once I had done that, what was left for you, poor human murderers, to do? To kill your victims? But they already had the seed of death in them; all you could do was to hasten its fruition by a year or two."
"I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter."
"What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed."
"The woman who does not choose to love should cut the matter short at once, by holding out no hopes to her suitor."
"Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is."
"The public relations warriors fought and lost Monte Carlo's Battle of the Magazine Covers."
"Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day."
"Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees."
"At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it."
"Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong."
"It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity."
"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed."
"It's risky in a marriage for a man to come home too late, but it can sometimes pose an even greater risk if he comes home too early."
"What makes night within us may leave stars."
"A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images."
"We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves we desire to live an imaginary life in the minds of others and for this purpose we endeavor to shine."
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