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Quotes by French Authors
"It matters more what's in a woman's face than what's on it."
"Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society."
"There go my people, I must find out where they are going so I can lead them."
"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."
"Out of difficulties grow miracles."
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
"Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius."
"To eat steak rare... represents both a nature and a morality."
"I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world."
"True republicanism is the sovereignty of the people. There are natural and imprescriptible rights which an entire nation has no right to violate."
"If you do not believe you can do it then you have no chance at all."
"No temptation can ever be measured by the value of its object."
"A battle won is a battle which we will not acknowledge to be lost."
"Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them."
"Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury."
"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."
"His hands would plait the priest's guts, if he had no rope, to strangle kings."
"I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't."
"All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry."
"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."
"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?"
"Ones reputation is like a shadow, it is gigantic when it precedes you, and a pigmy in proportion when it follows."
"The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation."
"Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces."
"He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for his, that's for sure; to carry your name, the name of a fool, I'll be bound " you may as well write that name on some wall; why do you need a man to bear the burden of three or four letters?"
"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."
"It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning."
"The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
"The French have got to understand that a film is so expensive that it can no longer afford to be regional or even national in scope."
"After Babar's mother was killed by the hunter, he went to the big city."
"Punctuality is the politeness of kings."
"It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist."
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