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Quotes by French Authors

"The antiquity and general acceptance of an opinion is not assurance of its truth."

"Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you."

"Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer."

"I sometimes feel like I could do another job. Anything. Maybe because as an actress you're playing different characters, everything feels possible."

"All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth."

"Ideas rose in clouds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination."


"Beauty always promises, but never gives anything."

"Therefore one should speak at the same time of national citizenship and wider European citizenship."


"Ignorance is the primary source of all misery and vice."

"I had become interested in economics, an interest that was transformed into a lifetime dedication when I met with the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium."

"When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing."

"One falls to the ground in trying to sit on two stools."

"The important thing in life is not to triumph but to compete."

"Preoccupation with money is the great test of small natures, but only a small test of great ones."

"Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy."

"The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction."

"People of quality know everything without ever having learned anything."

"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."

"It wasn't all frustration. I've had a lot of good times with Ferrari as well."

"If you start to take Vienna - take Vienna."

"When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, it is a proof that it should be rejected."

"The ideal, without doubt, varies, but its enemies, alas, are always the same."

"The quality of life is more important than life itself."

"A man can keep another's secret better than his own. A woman her own better than others."

"We never taste happiness in perfection, our most fortunate successes are mixed with sadness."


"The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute."

"French design hardly exists, except as artificial modernism."
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