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Quotes by French Authors
"It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants."
"Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to."
"Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need."
"We must stop posing as victims of the West and behaving negatively towards the West. We must participate with the West on an equal footing in the reconstruction of the world."
"Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it."
"The heart has reasons which reason cannot understand."
"You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you."
"An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God."
"Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant. Cold is agreeable, that we may get warm."
"It is not easy to imagine how little interested a scientist usually is in the work of any other, with the possible exception of the teacher who backs him or the student who honors him."
"There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language."
"The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself."
"If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...?"
"Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible."
"And the fact that I see so many films really seems to amaze certain people."
"Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes."
"The man that thinks he loves his mistress for her own sake is mightily mistaken."
"Going out in Paris was like going out in the '30s dressed like the Andrews Sisters. It was everything I'd seen in books at my grandparents' house, only it was our generation."
"One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet."
"Public opinion is the thermometer a monarch should constantly consult."
"What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be."
"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."
"All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose."
"I am not feeling any better because I cannot stay in bed, having constant cause for walking. They say I leave at night by the window of my tower, hanging from a red umbrella with which I set fire to the forest!"
"There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn."
"Next to sound judgment, diamonds and pearls are the rarest things in the world."
"The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns."
"Never sell the bear's skin before one has killed the beast."
"The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance."
"Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive."
"Let them be reassured, it has never been one of our intentions to ban religion in society, but solely to protect the national education system from any conspicuous display of religious affiliation."
"After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it."
"Courage! I have shown it for years; think you I shall lose it at the moment when my sufferings are to end?"
"I am convinced that our movement will be more demoralized and weakened by blind and uncritical admiration than by frank admission of past mistakes."
"Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists."
"Shadow is a colour as light is, but less brilliant; light and shadow are only the relation of two tones."
"I'm not a movie star like other actors in the way that I need to walk with a bodyguard."
"For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence."
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