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Quotes by French Authors

"The United States, for a French citizen, is a friend, an ally, to whom we owe, along with most Europeans, our freedom."

"You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable."

"Already at the origin of the species man was equal to what he was destined to become."


"Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured."

"I would rather do movies because I'm very lazy and the hours are much easier."

"Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path."

"When I need a word and do not find it in French, I select it from other tongues, and the reader has either to understand or translate me. Such is my fate."

"Our experience is composed rather of illusions that of wisdom acquired."

"I'm interested in everthing but passionate about nothing."

"Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself."

"In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating."

"Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse."

"If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by the laws."

"Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom."

"We reproach people for talking about themselves; but it is the subject they treat best."

"When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he is, and respect for what he may become."

"When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties."

"Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?"

"Authority doesn't work without prestige, or prestige without distance."

"In order to conquer, what we need is to dare, still to dare, and always to dare."

"Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious."

"I chose to treat the homosexuality like I would treat any other form of sexuality."

"I was less successful in my attempts to effect preventive vaccination against typhus by using the virus and in trying to produce large quantities of serum using large animals."

"Time makes friendship stronger, but love weaker."

"As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension."

"To be a professional tennis player you need to put in these sort of hours."

"We seldom praise anyone in good earnest, except such as admire us."

"But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially."
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