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Quotes by French Authors
"I can't belong to groups. I've tried. I behave normally, but people don't look at me normally."
"The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me."
"A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else."
"It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man."
"A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well."
"A man who kills on his own is a murderer. A man who kills at his government's request is a national hero."
"The beautiful souls are they that are universal, open, and ready for all things."
"One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table."
"I am a man, and nothing that concerns a man do I deem a matter of indifference to me."
"America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."
"The mind uses its faculty for creativity only when experience forces it to do so."
"Whatever is enforced by command is more imputed to him who exacts than to him who performs."
"The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste."
"Hope, insofar as it is hope of resurrection, is the living contradiction of what it proceeds from and what is placed under the sign of the Cross and death."
"One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void."
"But I've never felt that being an actress is being in a comfortable place. It's seen from the outside that we're being driven in big cars and having these gorgeous suites and all of that. But come on, it's not about that."
"If we all told what we know of one another there would not be four friends in the world."
"A scientist worthy of his name, about all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature."
"I think that we must come together progressively, with the British, the Germans, the Spanish, the Italians and with the new members of the European Union, we must make an effort to forge closer links."
"In the old days the worst part of my depression used to be the astonishment it caused me, the scandalized way in which I fought against it. Nowadays, on the other hand, I accept it cheerfully enough, like an old familiar friend."
"The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men."
"All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.'I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view."
"Pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall."
"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul."
"I quote others only in order the better to express myself."
"Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do."
"I have the fault of being a little more sincere than is proper."
"For life is tendency, and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions among which its impetus is divided."
"He no longer loves the person whom he loved ten years ago. I quite believe it. She is no longer the same, nor is he. He was young, and she also; she is quite different. He would perhaps love her yet, if she were what she was then."
"You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. Do no bother yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life clear."
"The experimenter who does not know what he is looking for will not understand what he finds."
"In France, you're with the crew, and you have lunch with them. It's more like a family."
"Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil."
"As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays it is the only desert within our reach."
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