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Quotes by French Authors
"We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder."
"I regret not doing a film that I was offered with Clark Gable because the script was not good enough."
"There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck."
"It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert."
"I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world."
"A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can."
"Men don't get smarter when they grow older. They just lose their hair."
"In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others."
"Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, all this hurly-burly in my head existed for nobody."
"If you wish to avoid seeing a fool you must first break your looking glass."
"What's surprising is that the people who fought against torture here are the communists."
"To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations."
"Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast."
"There is no praise to bear the sort that you put in your pocket."
"No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does."
"He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves - in Man... For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass."
"It's not too good to have this attitude in F1. It could be a disadvantage."
"Lazy people are always anxious to be doing something."
"It is impossible to disregard such an important medium as television. We should know how to use it, learn to work in it and express new values in it."
"All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room."
"The law of nations is naturally founded on this principle, that different nations ought in time of peace to do one another all the good they can, and in time of war as little injury as possible, without prejudicing their real interests."
"Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. Defeat may prove to have been the only path to resurrection, despite its ugliness. I take it for granted that to create a tree I condemn a seed to rot. If the first act of resistance comes too late it is doomed to defeat. But it is, nevertheless, the awakening of resistance. Life may grow from it as from a seed."
"Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages."
"I do not admire the excess of a virtue like courage unless I see at the same time an excess of the opposite virtue, as in Epaminondas, who possessed extreme courage and extreme kindness. We show greatness not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between."
"We do not have feelings which change us, but feelings that suggest to us the idea of change. Thus love does not purge us of selfishness, but makes us aware of it and gives us the idea of a distant country where this selfishness will disappear."
"When you give yourself, you receive more than you give."
"So what I had believed to be nothing to me was simply my entire life. How ignorant one is of oneself."
"We are all strong enough to bear other men's misfortunes."
"When a man is in love, he doubts, very often, what he most firmly believes."
"You arrive at a village, and in this calm environment, one starts to hear echo."
"One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends."
"In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?"
"I go, I go away, I walk, I wander, and everywhere I go I bear my shell with me, I remain at home in my room, among my books, I do not approach an inch nearer to Marrakech or Timbuktu. Even if I took a train, a boat, or a motor-bus, if I went to Morocco for my holiday, if I suddenly arrived at Marrakech, I should be always in my room, at home. And if I walked in the squares and in the sooks, if I gripped an Arab's shoulder, to feel Marrakech in his person - well, that Arab would be at Marrakech, not I : I should still be seated in my room, placid and meditative as is my chosen life, two thousand miles away from the Moroccan and his burnoose. In my room. Forever."
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