top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by French Authors
"It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational."
"Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life."
"The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!"
"What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table?"
"Women sometimes allow you to be unfaithful to their love, they never allow you to wound their self-esteem."
"I bet you think an egg is something you casually order for breakfast when you can't think of anything else. Well, so did I once, but that was before the egg and I."
"The most wasted day is that in which we have not laughed."
"What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner."
"Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light."
"The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul."
"However many blessings we expect from God, His infinite liberality will always exceed all our wishes and our thoughts."
"Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains."
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
"It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!"
"On the throne, one has many worries; and remorse is the one that weighs the least."
"The bond between being and non-being can be only internal. It is within being qua being that non-being must arise, and within non-being that being must spring up; and this relation can not be a fact, a natural law, but an upsurge of the being which is its own nothingness of being."
"For Ryan's Daughter I used a total of eight harps, something that was, at least, weird."
"No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else."
"In fine, nothing is said now that has not been said before."
"Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity."
"The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one's designs to one's means."
"I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other."
"A fact in itself is nothing. It is valuable only for the idea attached to it, or for the proof which it furnishes."
"I know a lot of Americans in Paris who have married Frenchmen. They keep bringing up their experience, the clash of civilizations, the clash of personalities."
"The Holy Spirit alone can do this, the Holy Spirit alone can establish this link with one's neighbor."
"I do not cling to life sufficiently to fear death."
"Unlike in my young days I'm not able to eat, drink and sleep tennis."
"Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened."
bottom of page