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Quotes by French Authors
"Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts."
"We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves."
"Had no need of a guide to learn ignorance."
"Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known."
"Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait."
"If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom."
"Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them."
"I took pleasure when I could. I acted clearly and morally and without regret. I'm very lucky."
"I have an old hat which is not worth three francs, I have a coat which lacks buttons in front, my shirt is all ragged, my elbows are torn, my boots let in the water; for the last six weeks I have not thought about it, and I have not told you about it. You only see me at night, and you give me your love; if you were to see me in the daytime, you would give me a sou!"
"I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist."
"It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character."
"Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently."
"You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception."
"So many people say that obviously my game has changed since I arrived here and I say that it's good that it changed, otherwise it would show a lack of intelligence."
"As a teenager, I didn't want to be me; I wanted to be many different people. Maybe I realized that they all lived inside me and that if I managed to connect with them, they would become aspects of me."
"I never thought of becoming a director. When I was twelve, the passage from silent film to the talkies had an impact on me - I still watch silent films."
"I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior."
"I've always had the impression that real militants are like cleaning women, doing a thankless, daily but necessary job."
"It's true Heaven forbids some pleasures, but a compromise can usually be found."
"My contract is just for this year, but I have an option for next year. It is not signed at this moment, but I am only concentrating on this year. I don't know exactly what I will do in the future."
"We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence."
"There has also been much love, joy, evidence of admiration, there has never been one without the other."
"Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it."
"Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune."
"I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another."
"There are not fifty ways of fighting, there's only one, and that's to win. Neither revolution nor war consists in doing what one pleases."
"Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of as faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need for it."
"I believe in Karma. If the good is sown, the good is collected. When positive things are made, that returns well."
"But it is impossible to divide a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into fourth powers, or generally any power beyond the square into like powers; of this I have found a remarkable demonstration. This margin is too narrow to contain it."
"But when you work with the director and the real person who is playing opposite you, it changes everything. You are almost in a working session. I was very comfortable, and that's maybe what helped me to get the part."
"To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light."
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