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Quotes by French Authors
"Communism is in conflict with human nature."
"Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there's always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills."
"Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country, fought to save it, struggled to make it beautiful. Only then will the love of farm or country fill his heart."
"The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life! And yet can we cast out of our spirits all the good or evil poured into them by so many learned generations? Ignorance cannot be learned."
"It is a sad thing when men have neither the wit to speak well nor the judgment to hold their tongues."
"Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization."
"The soldier's main enemy is not the opposing soldier, but his own commander."
"The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it."
"Do not make best friends with a melancholy sad soul. They always are heavily loaded, and you must bear half."
"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."
"Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy."
"Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction."
"America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization."
"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."
"And today more than ever, knowing about that society involves first of all choosing what approach the inquiry will take, and that necessarily means choosing how society can answer."
"The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life."
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