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Quotes by French Authors
"Only passions, great passions can elevate the soul to great things."
"In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. 'I don't want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don't see what use he is."
"There go my people, I must find out where they are going so I can lead them."
"Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury."
"It matters more what's in a woman's face than what's on it."
"His hands would plait the priest's guts, if he had no rope, to strangle kings."
"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do."
"My soul's a burden to me, I've had enough of it. I'm eager to be in that country, where the sun kills every question. I don't belong here."
"Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things."
"I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world."
"Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society."
"Ones reputation is like a shadow, it is gigantic when it precedes you, and a pigmy in proportion when it follows."
"We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire."
"Punctuality is the politeness of kings."
"True republicanism is the sovereignty of the people. There are natural and imprescriptible rights which an entire nation has no right to violate."
"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."
"To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody."
"It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure."
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
"The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
"I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't."
"It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist."
"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."
"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?"
"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."
"Loving is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction."
"Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces."
"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."
"To doubt everything, or, to believe everything, are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection."
"The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light."
"Nothing is as dangerous as an ignorant friend; a wise enemy is to be preferred."
"The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it."
"The thing that attracted me about philosophy was that it went straight to essentials. I had never liked fiddling detail; I perceived the general significance of things rather than their singularities, and I preferred understanding to seeing; I had always wanted to know everything; philosophy would allow me to appease this desire, for it aimed at total reality;philosophy went right to the heart of truth and revealed to me, instead of an illusory whirlwind of facts or empirical laws, an order, a reason, a necessity in everything."
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