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Quotes by French Authors
"I thank you for your kind invitation to introduce me to the president of the Republic. Since I have not been out of my atelier for two months, I have no appropriate costume for this circumstance. Please excuse me."
"With a painter's temperament, all that's needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public."
"You promised to take care of me and not to turn your back on me. How is it possible that you never wrote to me even once and you never came back to see me? Do you think that it is fun for me to spend months, even years, without any news, without any hope!"
"We were the best team in the world: European champions in 1984, we qualified without a hitch and 86 was to be the swan song for a very experienced side."
"Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite are contrived to be constant companions."
"We believe that the European Union is facing a truly historic choice."
"If we prove capable of showing a pioneering commitment, we shall create a commmunity listened to around the world."
"How come he cannot recognize his own cruelty now turned against him? How come he can't see his own savagery as a colonist in the savagery of these oppressed peasants who have absorbed it through every pore and for which they can find no cure? The answer is simple: this arrogant individual, whose power of authority and fear of losing it has gone to his head, has difficulty remembering he was once a man; he thinks he is a whip or a gun; he is convinced that the domestication of the "inferior races" is obtained by governing their reflexes. He disregards the human memory, the indelible reminders; and then, above all, there is this that perhaps he never know: we only become what we are by radically negating deep down what others have done to us."
"Hearing, which, by the motion of the air, informs us of the motion of sounding or vibrating bodies."
"Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other."
"It is impossible for any number which is a power greater than the second to be written as a sum of two like powers. I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain."
"My task is becoming more and more delicate, while the difficulties increase constantly."
"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself a fool."
"Men's economic privilege, their social value, the prestige of marriage, the usefulness of masculine support-all these encourage women to ardently want to please men. They are on the whole still in a state of serfdom. It follows that woman knows and chooses herself not as she exists for herself but as man defines her. She thus has to be described first as men dream of her since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition."
"Two sittings a day of my models and I'm totally exhausted."
"I was quite excited, but I was sure I wouldn't win the race. I am a realist."
"There are more people who wish to be loved than there are who are willing to love."
"The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist."
"A conscience without God is like a court without a judge."
"People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?"
"There is something so awe-inspiring in great afflictions that even in the worst times the first emotion of a crowd has generally been to sympathise with the sufferer in a great catastrophe."
"Providence was well aware what lay ahead for me, and my Capuchin training was to prepare me for it."
"You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet."
"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America."
"I hated seeing myself on screen. I was full of complexes. I hated my face for a very, very long time."
"I was playing the best football of my career at the time, finishing top scorer in Italy three year's running. There were other good players around but I think I was the best at that time."
"Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him."
"Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason."
"It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor."
"I toured the Middle Eastern countries with the ballet."
"I am not finding pregnancy much of a joy. I am afraid of childbirth, but I am afraid I can't find a way of avoiding it."
"It is a crime against the State to be powerful enough to commit one."
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