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Quotes by French Authors
"Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore."
"All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent."
"It is a great act of cleverness to be able to conceal one's being clever."
"The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud."
"Nothingness not being nothing, nothingness being emptiness."
"The sure mark of one born with noble qualities is being born without envy."
"It is true that the king has made a truce with the duke of Burgundy for fifteen days and that the duke is to turn over the city of Paris at the end of fifteen days. Yet you should not marvel if I do not enter that city so quickly."
"Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me."
"It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it."
"Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist."
"One only understands the things that one tames, said the fox. "Men haveno more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at theshops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and somen have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me. . ."
"Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words."
"Diplomats are useful only in fair weather. As soon as it rains they drown in every drop."
"Absolute space, that is to say, the mark to which it would be necessary to refer the earth to know whether it really moves, has no objective existence."
"Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices."
"Cosette, by learning that she was beautiful, lost the grace of not knowing it; an exquisite grace, for beauty heightened by artlessness is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as dazzling innocence, going on her way, and holding in her hand, all unconsciousness, the key of a paradise."
"Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children."
"The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies."
"Riches do not consist in the possession of treasures, but in the use made of them."
"I would not be opposed to devising a new system of pensions, in which one part was based on collective provision, but which also gave incentives for people to take out an additional, personal plan."
"The world is going to become bloody stupid and from now on will be a very boring place. We're lucky to be living now."
"It's silly to work hard the whole week and then spoil it by not preparing properly before the game."
"When I see the cultural diversity that exists today, I feel that we must defend it, and we need Europe, because otherwise we are going to live in a society with a single model, the Anglo-American model."
"Ah, Monsieur Priest, you love not the crudities of the true. Christ loved them. He seized a rod and cleared out the Temple. His scourge, full of lightnings, was a harsh speaker of truths. When he cried, 'Sinite parvulos,' he made no distinction between the little children. It would not have embarrassed him to bring together the Dauphin of Barabbas and the Dauphin of Herod. Innocence, Monsieur, is its own crown. Innocence has no need to be a highness. It is as august in rags as in fleurs de lys."
"Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?"
"I think we should put the same weight now on the co-factors as we have on HIV."
"Her mind, shaped so long before my own, was for me the equivalent of what had been offered me by the behaviour of the girls of the little gang along the sea-shore. Mme de Guermantes offered me, tamed and subdued by good manners, by respect for intellectual values, the energy and charm of a cruel little girl from one of the noble families around Combray, who from her childhood had ridden horses, sadistically tormented cats, gouged out the eyes of rabbits, and, while remaining a paragon of virtue, might equally well have been, some years back now, and so much did she share his dashing style, the most glamorous mistress of the Prince de Sagan."
"To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing."
"Too great haste to repay an obligation is a kind of ingratitude."
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