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Quotes by French Authors
"No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters."
"In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness."
"I murmur: "It's a seat," a little like an exorcism. But the word stays on my lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing. It stays what it is, with its red plush, thousands of little red paws in the air, all still, little dead paws. This enormous belly turned upward, bleeding, inflated-bloated with all its dead paws, this belly floating in this car, in this grey sky, is not a seat. It could just as well be a dead donkey tossed about in the water, floating with the current, belly in the air in a great grey river, a river of floods; and I could be sitting on the donkey's belly, my feet dangling in the clear water."
"People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I wantto vomit-and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea."
"For this to make sense, of course, it would have to be a fair financial deal for us. But I think this could be the occasion for us to build a true partnership in content. And we're especially interested because interactive services are a key field for us."
"And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown it that the ancients did not know everything."
"An art which isn't based on feeling isn't an art at all."
"The problem of direct colour photography has been facing us since the turn of the last century."
"We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities."
"Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do."
"Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world."
"Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it."
"Emotions have taught mankind to reason."
"When we make the cerebral state the beginning of an action, and in no sense the condition of a perception, we place the perceived images of things outside the image of our body, and thus replace perception within the things themselves."
"Politeness makes one appear outwardly as they should be within."
"No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa."
"Had we not faults of our own, we should take less pleasure in complaining of others."
"The investigator should have a robust faith - and yet not believe."
"My nervous system is enfeebled, only work in oils can sustain me."
"The 50 greatest players don't matter when you're in the Hall of Fame. We all know that I was not one of the 50 greatest, I was one of the 25 greatest - in my mind."
"Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand."
"Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs."
"You must take the risk to disclose yourself in order to become more real, more human. And even if the price is high."
"There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another."
"All earthly delights are sweeter in expectation than in enjoyment; but all spiritual pleasures more in fruition than in expectation."
"Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much."
"In less than eighteen months, it prepared a first draft which it submitted to the General Assembly and which, at the end of one hundred sessions of elevated, often impassioned discussion, was adopted in the form of thirty articles on December 10, 1948."
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