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Quotes by French Authors
"Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete."
"An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something."
"The word is half his that speaks and half his that hears it."
"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."
"There is nothing we can now call our own, for what we call so is the effect of art; crimes are made by decrees of the senate, or by the votes of the people; and as here-to-fore we are burdened by vices, so now we are oppressed by laws."
"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
"The beauty of stature is the only beauty of men."
"Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality."
"Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties."
"It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish."
"I absolutely loathe luxury. It is the one thing I cannot stand."
"A secret is not something unrevealed, but something told privately, in a whisper."
"Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation, the source of strength is one's self. When one prays, he goes to a source of strength greater than his own."
"A good model can advance fashion by ten years."
"The more you turn down things, the more difficult it becomes to feel that the next one will be right."
"A geometry implies the heterogeneity of locus, namely that there is a locus of the Other. Regarding this locus of the Other, of one sex as Other, as absolute Other, what does the most recent development in topology allow us to posit?"
"Well, you're free without wanting to be,' he explained, 'it just happens so, that's all. But Mathieu's freedom is based on reason.''I still don't understand,' said Lola, shaking her head.'Well, he doesn't care a curse about his apartment: he lives there just as he would live anywhere else, and I've got the feeling that he doesn't care much about his girl. He stays with her because he must sleep with someone. His freedom isn't visible, it's inside him."
"There are truths that are not for all men nor for all times."
"I've come to the conclusion that it's not really possible to help others."
"Testimony should be a philosophical problem and not limited to legal or historical contexts where it refers to the account of a witness who reports what he has seen."
"Draw your pleasure, paint your pleasure, and express your pleasure strongly."
"I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all."
"Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it."
"What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe."
"The sublimity of administration consists in knowing the proper degree of power that should be exerted on different occasions."
"And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die."
"It's more than a job. It's very personal, so when you're hurt, you're really hurt inside."
"This is the century of fear."
"The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means."
"The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary."
"I found it very difficult to explain to someone why you did a film. It's not like having a conversation."
"For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding."
"Modesty is the conscience of the body."
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
"You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless."
"I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity."
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