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Quotes by French Authors
"If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow."
"The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation."
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
"Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second."
"What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?"
"I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization."
"Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury."
"Punctuality is the politeness of kings."
"Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces."
"Love often leads on to ambition, but seldom does one return from ambition to love."
"The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression."
"To eat steak rare... represents both a nature and a morality."
"His hands would plait the priest's guts, if he had no rope, to strangle kings."
"If you do not believe you can do it then you have no chance at all."
"The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it."
"It's a tough world out there and all the guys are fighting hard and the competition is really tough."
"A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent."
"It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning."
"I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't."
"Conceit causes more conversation than wit."
"Out of difficulties grow miracles."
"The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character."
"To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death."
"On the other hand, in a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an issue, it is clear that language assumes a new importance."
"Loving is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction."
"Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians."
"The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light."
"To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date."
"Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them."
"The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
"Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house."
"It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist."
"No temptation can ever be measured by the value of its object."
"In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth."
"Once men are caught up in an event, they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men."
"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do."
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