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Quotes by French Authors
"Without doubt, it is a delightful harmony when doing and saying go together."
"I have been very happy, very rich, very beautiful, much adulated, very famous and very unhappy."
"It's true that the question of Iraq divided Europe."
"The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that 'black hole' is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions-nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze.With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur."
"When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity."
"A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire."
"Jealousy is not so much the love of another as the love of ourselves."
"Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought."
"That is a dream also; only he has remained asleep, while you have awakened; and who knows which of you is the most fortunate?"
"I was never a dangerous woman. I'm not the prissy blonde woman that could take your husband away."
"All human language draws its nature and value from the fact that it both comes from the Word of God and is chosen by God to manifest himself. But this relationship is secret and incomprehensible, beyond the bounds of reason and analysis."
"My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact."
"We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful."
"And on the endless dusty ribbon of the highway, on sunken roads vaulted over by branches, on paths between stands of grain that rose to his knees, the sun on his shoulders and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the night's bliss, his spirit at peace and his flesh content, he would ride on his way ruminating his happiness, like someone who keeps savoring, hours later, the fragrance of the truffles he has eaten for dinner."
"It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else."
"Without inquiring too deeply into the causes which make it possible to find subjects of gaiety always close at hand, the proof of that possibility can be found in the fact that persons of sensitive intelligence are capable of finding comic potentialities in everything and everybody, thereby demonstrating that if some people hold the belief that there is very little that is laughable in the world, the reason is that they lack the ability to find it."
"Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions."
"That we must love one God only is a thing so evident that it does not require miracles to prove it."
"The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it."
"France needs to find something that makes it stand out. It's not enough for it to do almost as well as its neighbors."
"He takes a few dazed steps, the waiters turn out the lights and he slips into unconsciousness: when this man is lonely he sleeps."
"Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless."
"It seems that the people of Oran are like that friend of Flaubert who, on the point of death, casting a last glance at the irreplaceable earth, exclaimed: "Close the window, it's too beautiful."
"We call first truths those we discover after all the others."
"It is a false and dangerous situation which bases public power on private want, and roots the grandeur of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a badly constituted grandeur which combines all the material elements, and into which no moral element enters."
"The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first."
"An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?"
"The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one."
"The important thing is staying together if you want to do something special."
"I think it's the same simple thing for everyone - to be happy, and have love in your life."
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