top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by French Authors
"Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal."
"Men die:and they are not happy."
"I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man."
"Lust is the source of all our actions, and humanity."
"The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness."
"Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine."
"We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are."
"He has willed - He wills incessantly - that the modifications of the mind and those of the body shall be reciprocal. This is the conjunction and the natural dependence of the two parts of which we are constituted."
"I have realized that we all have plague, and I have lost my peace. And today I am still trying to find it; still trying to understand all those others and not to be the enemy of anyone. I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken, and that's the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. This, and only this, can bring relief to men and, if not save them, at least do them the least harm possible and even, sometimes, a little good."
"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."
"Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul."
"In Burgundy and in the cities of the South the tree of Liberty was planted. That is to say, a pole topped by the revolutionary red bonnet."
"In silence alone does a man's truth bind itself together and strike root."
"I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all."
"He who despairs of the human condition is a coward but he who has hope for it is a fool."
"If you are to be, you must begin by assuming responsibility."
"Without knowing it, Javert in his awful happiness was deserving of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could have been more poignant or more heartrending than that countenance on which was inscribed all the evil in what is good."
"No doctor takes pleasure in the health even of his friends."
"Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed."
"Let it not be said that I have said nothing new. The arrangement of the material is new."
"Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will."
"I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride."
"I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language."
"A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil."
"Better a good journalist than a poor assassin."
"Even so did you feel yourself swept away by that inward migration about which no one had ever said a word to you. A great wind swept through and delivered from the matrix the sleeping prince you sheltered- man within you. You are the equal of the musician composing his music, of the physicist extending the frontier of knowledge you have reached an altitude where all loves are of the same stuff."
"What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?"
"The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present."
"I dream of a collaboration that would finally be total, in which the librettist would often think as a composer and the composer as a librettist."
"Those that despise people will never get the best out of others and themselves."
"The greater number of a man's errors come before him disguised under the specious form of necessity; then, after error has been committed in a moment of excitement, of delirium, or of fear, we see that we might have avoided and escaped it."
"Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder."
"She knew this man's smile, his gentle ways of love, but not his godlike fury in the storm. She might snare him in a fragile net of music, love and flowers, but, at each departure, he would break forth without, it seemed to her, the least regret."
"Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness."
"She had accepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness. He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage."
"If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?"
bottom of page