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Quotes by French Authors
"Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces."
"Only passions, great passions can elevate the soul to great things."
"It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning."
"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do."
"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?"
"Loving is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction."
"It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist."
"But an action which wants to serve man ought to be careful not to forget him on the way, if it chooses to fulfill itself blindly, it will lose its meaning or will take on an unforeseen meaning; for the goal is not fixed once & for all; it is defined all along the road which leads up to it."
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
"Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things."
"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."
"The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation."
"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 always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure."
"We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges."
"I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery."
"Nothing is as dangerous as an ignorant friend; a wise enemy is to be preferred."
"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."
"I've done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I've been swindled all the same because it's never anything more."
"No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point."
"The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years."
"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?"
"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."
"The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light."
"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."
"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."
"A constitution that is made for all nations is made for none."
"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding."
"The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
"Coffee is a beverage that puts one to sleep when not drank."
"Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor."
"I've lived the life of a man without teeth, he thought about it. A life of a man without teeth. I've never bitten, I've been waiting, keeping myself for later - and now I've just ascertained that I don't have teeth anymore."
"It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator burdened with all the contradictions in the world."
"To doubt everything, or, to believe everything, are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection."
"No man is excluded from calling upon God, the gate of salvation is set open unto all men: neither is there any other thing which keepeth us back from entering in, save only our own unbelief."
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