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Quotes by French Authors
"There is only one thing that can form a bond between men, and that is gratitude... we cannot give someone else greater power over us than we have ourselves."
"Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it."
"There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools."
"I know what's best for me, after all I have been in the Claudette Colbert business longer than anybody."
"Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them."
"He went farther; agonised by the reflection, at the moment when it passed by him, so near and yet so infinitely remote, that, while it was addressed to their ears, it knew them not, he would regret, almost, that it had a meaning of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, foreign to themselves, just as in the jewels given to us, or even in the letters written to us by a woman with whom we are in love, we find fault with the 'water' of a stone, or with the words of a sentence because they are not fashioned exclusively from the spirit of a fleeting intimacy and of a 'lass unaparalleled."
"The implementation measures of both Covenants, but especially those of the Covenant concerning civil and political rights, were considerably weakened to the point where they assumed an optional character."
"We too, through lack of knowledge and of sufficiently mature reflection, mistook the visible outward appearance of the phenomenon for the phenomenon itself."
"Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free."
"There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself."
"If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others could never harm us."
"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."
"It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all."
"I shall confess at the outset that it was only shortly after the beginning of this century that I entered active life - with a somewhat precocious capacity for involvement."
"It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous."
"Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it."
"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant."
"Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them."
"The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel."
"I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous."
"We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all."
"There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you."
"I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about the rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. the marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected."
"The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order."
"She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries."
"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
"I think it's good for sporting justice that Ronaldo scored twice in the final."
"The passion of hatred is so long lived and so obstinate a malady that the surest sign of death in a sick person is their desire for reconciliation."
"First, it doesn't surprise me that traditional music has experienced a kind of exhaustion in the 20th century - not forgetting that many musicians started to look outside the traditional structures of tonality."
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