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Quotes by French Authors
"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."
"Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed."
"When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
"Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself."
"It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil."
"The circumstances of human society are too complicated to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical calculation."
"He was one of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to."
"Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him."
"Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?"
"And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten-since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!"
"How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing."
"When we hide our failings from others, we seek to hide them from ourselves, and it is in the latter attempt that we are most successful."
"He had the confidence of a man who had never been wounded."
"But the same intelligence compels Germany to practise the same policy."
"Every man who has in his soul a secret feeling of revolt against any act of the State, of life, or of destiny, is on the verge of riot; and so soon as it appears, he begins to quiver, and to feel himself borne away by the whirlwind."
"You are only excused for happiness and success if you generously agree to share them. But if one is to be happy, one should not worry too much about other people - which means there is no way out. Happy and judged or absolved and miserable."
"We should note that this latter type of shift was successfully amplified to a considerable extent by Russian physicists using the intense light of a ruby laser whose wavelength is close to that of a transition of the potassium atom."
"The boughs, without becoming detached from the trunk grow away from it."
"When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die."
"One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!"And a little later you added:"You know-- one loves the sunet, when one is so sad...""Were you so sad, then?" I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?"But the little prince made no reply."
"I cannot stand the company of men. They flatter or they judge. I can stand neither of the two."
"Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there's always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her."
"How well I know you by your deeds and how invariably you succeed in living down to what one expects of you!"
"To conquer without danger is to conquer without glory."
"Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them."
"For I do not want any one to read my book carelessly. I have suffered too much grief in setting down these memories. Six years have already passed since my friend went away from me, with his sheep. If I try to describe him here, it is to make sure that I shall not forget him. To forget a friend is sad. Not every one has had a friend. And if I forget him, I may become like the grown-ups who are no longer interested in anything but figures."
"Maybe those sailors will write bad poems, but the same men would have kept dull diaries, too. The problem has to do not with the evidence but with the witness. The point is not the adventure but the adventurer. Reality cannot be directly rendered. Reality is a pile of bricks that can assume many forms."
"The result of this union would be, not the fortuitous result of a series of approximations and concessions, but the harmonious synthesis of two aspects of a single thought."
"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
"Alfred Nobel's discoveries are characteristic; powerful explosives can help men perform admirable tasks. They are also a means to terrible destruction in the hands of the great criminals who lead peoples to war."
"The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason."
"I loved her [Gilberte]; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to hurt her, to force her to keep some memory of me. I thought her so beautiful that I should have liked to be able to retrace my steps so as to shake my fist at her and shout, "I think you're hideous, grotesque; how I loathe you!""
"When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior."
"In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships."
"Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention."
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