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Quotes by French Authors
"All earthly delights are sweeter in expectation than in enjoyment; but all spiritual pleasures more in fruition than in expectation."
"I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is."
"Soldiers generally win battles; generals get credit for them."
"Short of genius a rich man cannot even imagine poverty."
"When a French book becomes an international hit it is because of the author and not because of the language. The same goes for movies."
"We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves."
"Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority."
"But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands."
"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly."
"No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness."
"I toured the Middle Eastern countries with the ballet."
"God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through."
"The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence."
"Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened."
"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."
"Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible."
"In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?"
"Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere."
"Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just."
"Beware, so long as you live, of judging men by their outward appearance."
"I have had the problem of seeing my male model go to Italy and... stay there."
"Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality."
"A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them."
"There are always flowers for those who want to see them."
"An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture."
"Chance is the one thing you can't buy. You have to pay for it and you have to pay for it with your life, spending a lot of time, you pay for it with time, not the wasting of time but the spending of time."
"In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned."
"Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness."
"The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts."
"Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge."
"A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world."
"We won the European Championship last September and now the world title. That is some year for French beach soccer! Now comes the hard part. We have to keep improving and that's difficult because it's tough to do better than winning a world title."
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