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Quotes by French Authors
"There is only one passion, the passion for happiness."
"As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture."
"A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again."
"Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made."
"It's the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don't say a word, they don't hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly."
"I began to understand my sensations, to know what I wanted, at around the age of forty - but only vaguely."
"It is better to decide a difference between enemies than friends, for one of our friends will certainly become an enemy and one of our enemies a friend."
"In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention."
"The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn't be in flashback."
"Do not take up music unless you would rather die than not do so."
"But I still serve pretty big and that's one of my biggest weapons, so if my shoulder holds up and I can count on it, I can win a few matches and then you never know how the other guys are going to react to the fatigue and the length of the matches."
"Avoid lawsuits beyond all things; they pervert your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property."
"Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself."
"I believe that when you work on yourself, you are attracted by different, more positive beings."
"I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me."
"The regeneration of society is the regeneration of society by individual education."
"I don't think we should speak so much. What if we were singing a song? We split, whilst singing."
"The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read."
"Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary."
"You have to study a great deal to know a little."
"I am one of those for whom superfluity is a necessity."
"An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say "Gentlemen" to the person with whom he is conversing."
"When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder."
"There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too."
"As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scen."
"So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us."
"Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language."
"In the old days when people invented a new function they had something useful in mind."
"Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth."
"She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:--"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you."She tried to smile once more and expired."
"During the work, you have to be sure that you haven't left any holes, that you've captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late."
"Just as the only reservoir for the typhus virus in nature is provided by man, so the only vector of infection is the louse. The bite of the louse is not virulent immediately after the infecting meal. It becomes so only towards the 7th day following infection."
"It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people."
"I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things."
"Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else."
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