top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by French Authors
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
"It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr."
"To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy."
"Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst."
"Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it."
"We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place."
"Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society."
"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly."
"Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own."
"What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country, we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits, this is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing. Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction, in Pascal's use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves."
"It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question."
"That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing."
"There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice."
"Woman is an eminently poetic reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to be."
"Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance."
"I remember in the first part of the race I was sixth and I could have gone quicker, but I had to go slow. It was one of the most difficult things I have ever done."
"One must credit an hypothesis with all that has had to be discovered in order to demolish it."
"The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know."
"Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it."
"Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it."
"Soldiers generally win battles; generals get credit for them."
"We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it."
"Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat."
"We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full."
"Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far."
"Peace is a natural effect of trade."
"I am indeed amazed when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error."
"A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets."
"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants."
"All sports must be treated on the basis of equality."
"The fact that I was fortunate enough to escape contagion, in spite of frequent, sometimes daily contacts with the disease, was because I soon guessed how it spread."
bottom of page