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Quotes by French Authors
"No man is so exquisitely honest or upright in living but that ten times in his life he might not lawfully be hanged."
"It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants."
"Laughter is regional: a smile extends over the whole face."
"Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things."
"By analogy, if we were to develop a soccer team, then we would not invite basketball and volleyball players to the try outs. We would invite soccer players to apply."
"A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed."
"It is always possible to argue against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them and to seek for an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach."
"The atmosphere of libraries, lecture rooms and laboratories is dangerous to those who shut themselves up in them too long. It separates us from reality like a fog."
"Nothing is so difficult but that it may be found out by seeking."
"We must never confuse elegance with snobbery."
"When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art."
"Knowledge of the sciences is so much smoke apart from the heavenly science of Christ."
"The reward of great men is that, long after they have died, one is not quite sure that they are dead."
"I am more exempt and more distant than any man in the world."
"All of our unhappiness comes from our inability to be alone."
"Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see."
"Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated."
"The Law is one aspect of a much more concrete and encompassing relation than the relation between commanding and obeying that characterizes the imperative."
"Prostitution happens to you because of troubles you had. In reality no woman would choose to do that."
"I took all my wax studies and threw them in the fire... that's the way it is when something unpleasant happens to me. I take my hammer and I squash a figure."
"I have against me the bourgeois, the military and the diplomats, and for me, only the people who take the Metro."
"Tell me, do you think I'm going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know."
"Murder is not the crime of criminals, but that of law-abiding citizens."
"I have the impression that cycling is no longer a game but rather an employment... a job."
"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
"There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard."
"Alone within the vast tribunal that is the stormy sky, the pilot is in contention for his mailbags with three elemental divinities: mountain, sea and storm."
"I do what I please, M. Beauchamp, and it is always well done."
"A slave has but one master; an ambitious man has as many masters as there are people who may be useful in bettering his position."
"Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one."
"Thus it cannot be denied that the masses which today form our highest mountains were originally in a liquid state; for a long time they were covered by waters which did not sustain any life."
"There is no hope or joy except in human relations."
"The word poet literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn't exist."
"Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm."
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