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Quotes by French Authors
"The best place for discovering what a man is is the heart of the desert. Your plane has broken down, and you walk for hours, heading for the little fort at Nutchott. You wait for the mirages of thirst to gape before you. But you arrive and you find an old sergeant who has been isolated for months among the dunes, and he is so happy to be found that he weeps. And you weep, too. In the arching immensity of the night, each tells the story of his life, each offers the other the burden of memories in which the human bond is discovered. Here two men can meet, and they bestow gifts upon each other with the dignity of ambassadors."
"Of course I love you. It is my fault that you have not known it all the while (the flower to little prince)"
"The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality."
"God instituted prayer to communicate to creatures the dignity of causality."
"A noble heart cannot suspect in others the pettiness and malice that it has never felt."
"I'm desperate to work again. I've often had those periods, but two years was the longest."
"A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language."
"We like security: we like the pope to be infallible in matters of faith, and grave doctors to be so in moral questions so that we can feel reassured."
"So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!"
"The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say - because they were too obvious."
"Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first."
"Our failings sometimes bind us to one another as closely as could virtue itself."
"War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other."
"You didn't succeed. Well, what of that? There's nothing to prove, you know, and the revolution's not a question of virtue but of effectiveness. There is no heaven. There's work to be done, that's all. And you must do what you're cut out for; all the better if it comes easy to you. The best work is not the work that takes the most sacrifice. It's the work in which you can best succeed."
"But it is obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis. To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive."
"For me, skiing is a physical necessity. I have a need for risk."
"For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved."
"It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most."
"I would have preferred to be successful here with a piece that cost me a huge amount of money and effort... rather than sending to Bohemia some ordinary works."
"All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling."
"Just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts."
"Faith is a sounder guide than reason. Reason can go only so far but faith has no limits."
"Some Italians are geniuses, but you have to find a balance."
"The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality."
"To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it."
"After which, satisfied with the way he had conducted himself at Meung, free of remorse for the past, confident in the present, and full of hope for the future, he went to bed and slept the sleep of the just."
"Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization."
"The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him."
"The flower in the vase smiles, but no longer laughs."
"The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes."
"It is pure illusion to think that an opinion that passes down from century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false."
"Everyone gets the feeling that they know you and they know your life, and I felt really embarrassed by that."
"At a young age winning is not the most important thing... the important thing is to develop creative and skilled players with good confidence."
"Take a sound from whatever source, a note on a violin, a scream, a moan, a creaking door, and there is always this symmetry between the sound basis, which is complex and has numerous characteristics which emerge through a process of comparison within our perception."
"Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?"
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