top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by French Authors
"There are moments when everything goes well, but don't be frightened."
"The man of science, the artist, the philosopher are attached to their nations as much as the day-laborer and the merchant."
"Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us."
"He doesn't play the game ... He refuses to lie. Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But Meursault, contrary to appearances, doesn't want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened."
"The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep."
"A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation."
"Charles and I go back since college. None of us thought this would happen, we just wanted to play basketball. This is the highest honor that can ever be paid, and it's mind-blowing."
"If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed but by answering: Because it was he, because it was myself."
"At Rome thing can or cannot be done when you are told anything cannot be done, there is an end of it.""It is much more convenient at Paris; when anything cannot be done you pay double and it is done directly."
"Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised."
"But vilifying those we love always detaches us from them a little. We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands."
"God! when you think of all the things you could do and yet somehow never do! All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn't come fast enough. Instead of being open, you're closed up tight. Thats's the worst sin of all - the sin of omission."
"There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite."
"You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you."
"Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same."
"She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist."
"So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears."
"Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence."
"Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness."
"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."
"There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start."
"Love is the most selfish of all the passions."
"Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation."
"I am all right when I work. I am not superficial and I am not ungrateful."
"Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him."
"There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create."
"Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated. Begin, and then the work will be completed."
"Thinking has become a superfluous exercise... purely internal, without compelling force, more or less a game."
"I have often said that I wish I had invented blue jeans: the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity - all I hope for in my clothes."
"Zeal is very blind, or badly regulated, when it encroaches upon the rights of others."
"An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture."
"Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country."
"All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure."
"An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along."
bottom of page