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Quotes by French Authors
"The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it."
"Since we had little money and few documents, we had nothing."
"Normal love isn't interesting. I assure you that it's incredibly boring."
"Joyful friends, mostly loyal, they hadn't abandoned their protector before the gathering storm; and despite the threatening sky, despite the shuddering earth, they remained, smiling, considerate, and as devoted to misfortune as they had been to prosperity."
"The thing that is important is the thing that is not seen...."
"Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better."
"In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different."
"Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity."
"On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters."
"I am a believer, but I affirm that in public buildings the law of the Republic overrides religious rules."
"I won't undertake war until I have tried all the arts and means of peace."
"There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous."
"The Indian knew how to live without wants, to suffer without complaint, and to die singing."
"Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them."
"The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being vanquished."
"The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself."
"So when I go home, sometimes, even when I had an amazing game, I always think about what I missed."
"This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered."
"The single outstanding exception was the broad yet precise mandate communicated by the General Assembly in 1946 to prepare as soon as possible the Charter of Human Rights which the San Francisco Conference had not had the time or the courage to draw up."
"Silence is the safest course for any man to adopt who distrust himself."
"Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness."
"I don't live that much with the character. I find it hard enough having to spend so many hours with the character during the day."
"In France we have a law which doesn't allow the press to publish a photo that you didn't approve. It lets the paparazzi take the picture, but if they publish this picture, you have the choice to sue the newspaper. So me, I always sued them."
"There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination."
"There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you've got it, you've got it. When you haven't, you begin again. All the rest is humbug."
"A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve."
"As soon as you set foot on a yacht you belong to some man, not to yourself, and you die of boredom."
"As far as I was concerned, either I was a homosexual or I wasn't, so making films would change nothing."
"There is no worse screen to block out the Spirit than confidence in our own intelligence."
"Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focii. Facts are one, ideas are the other."
"Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys."
"Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists."
"I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror."
"The Olympic Movement gives the world an ideal which reckons with the reality of life, and includes a possibility to guide this reality toward the great Olympic Idea."
"The first lover is kept a long while, when no offer is made of a second."
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