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Quotes by French Authors
"Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day."
"Do not make best friends with a melancholy sad soul. They always are heavily loaded, and you must bear half."
"Author: A fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come."
"To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend."
"Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established."
"Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future."
"Let us reflect, if we wish to be brilliant. Too much improvisation empties the mind in a stupid way. Running beer gathers no froth. No haste, gentlemen."
"The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless."
"We can act only in our time, among the people who surround us. We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. Since all contemporary action leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether, and why, we have the right to kill."
"Circumstances-what are circumstances? I make circumstances."
"The Beautiful is always strange."
"The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them."
"You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question."
"There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done."
"And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you..."
"The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge of a physical law."
"He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free."
"The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work."
"A wise man is superior to any insults which can be put upon him, and the best reply to unseemly behavior is patience and moderation."
"One can decide that the principal role of knowledge is as an indispensable element in the functioning of society, and act in accordance with that decision, only if one has already decided that society is a giant machine."
"Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction."
"It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason."
"Once upon a time there was a Queen who had a son so ugly and so misshapen that it was long disputed whether he had human form. A fairy who was at his birth said, however, that he would be very amiable for all that, since he would have uncommon good sense."
"Doubtless there are things in nature which have not yet been seen. If an artist discovers them, he opens the way for his successors."
"On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise."
"I have no fear of being less beautiful, I've always been afraid of not being beautiful."
"Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books."
"You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy."
"The United States, for a French citizen, is a friend, an ally, to whom we owe, along with most Europeans, our freedom."
"Killing someone is the ultimate crime, while on the other hand, killing someone in uniform is fulfillment of duty."
"Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones."
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