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Quotes by French Authors
"I ask you to pray for me, for once age has overtaken us, we find consolation only in religion."
"I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake."
"It's raining my soul, it's raining, but it's raining dead eyes."
"Generally speaking, there is more wit than talent in the world. Society swarms with witty people who lack talent."
"The fastidious are unfortunate; nothing satisfies them."
"Perfect reason flees all extremity, and leads one to be wise with sobriety."
"I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body: they transmit movement to it."
"One must change one's tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one's superiority."
"I like to take these unusual characters and then make them as normal as possible, because we all know that the tragedy and the abnormal always hides itself behind the normal."
"A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale."
"Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood."
"When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music."
"I simply took refuge among women. As you know, they don't really condemn any weakness; they would be more inclined to try to humiliate or disarm our strength. This is why woman is the reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal. She is his harbor, his haven; it is in a woman's bed that he is generally arrested. Is she not all that remains to us of earthly paradise?"
"Beauty is one of the rare things which does not lead to doubt of God."
"I don't like to go over curbs, because I don't want to be hard on the car."
"The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it."
"Oh, Mercedes, I have spoken your name with sighs of melancholy, with groans of pain and with the croak of despair. I have spoken it frozen with cold, huddled on the straw of my dungeon. I have spoken it raging with heat and rolling around on the stone floor of my prison. Mercedes, I must have my revenge, because for fourteen years I suffered, fourteen years I wept and cursed. Now, I say to you, Mercedes, I must have my revenge!"
"The occupation and robbery of a nation occurs under the illusion of freeing its citizens from brutal oppression."
"When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees."
"If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me."
"In most things success depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed."
"I am against marriage, and I don't give a fig for society."
"To lose one's self in reverie, one must be either very happy, or very unhappy. Reverie is the child of extremes."
"Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey."
"Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace."
"I think in England you eat too much sugar and meat and not enough vegetables."
"If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!"
"The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best."
"We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder."
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