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Quotes by French Authors
"Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to man's awareness of it."
"It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money."
"I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live."
"In truth, to go for a walk with one's eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that right now they do most obviously exist."
"The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues."
"Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love."
"In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul."
"Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just."
"Real worth requires no interpreter: its everyday deeds form its emblem."
"The scent of wine, oh how much more agreeable, laughing, praying, celestial and delicious it is than that of oil!"
"Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener."
"When two drivers curse each other on the road, and one of them happens to be a Jew, you can't define that as anti-Semitism."
"You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing."
"It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway."
"The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts."
"Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things."
"A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter."
"The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil."
"No one can be profoundly original who does not avoid eccentricity."
"No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell."
"First, it is not unimportant that the legislative texts of the Old Testament are placed in the mouth of Moses and within the narrative framework of the sojourn at Sinai."
"Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations between objects."
"To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object."
"There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment, for in another moment they will recover their illusion."
"Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments are almost impossible in human categories collectively kept in an inferior situation."
"My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect."
"Some colors are very difficult to render, and you must compensate to get the color you want on the screen."
"But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands."
"The richness of the world, all artificial pleasures, have the taste of sickness and give off a smell of death in the face of certain spiritual possessions."
"The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death."
"Is not a day divided into twenty-four hours, each hour into sixty minutes, and every minute sub-divided into sixty seconds? Now in 86,400 seconds many things can be done."
"That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget."
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