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Quotes by French Authors
"The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things."
"Lend your ear then to this tutti of steeples; diffuse over the whole the buzz of half a million of human beings, the eternal murmur of the river, the infinite piping of the wind, the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed like immense organs on the four hills of the horizon; soften down, as with a demi-tint, all that is too shrill and too harsh in the central mass of sound, and say if you know any thing in the world more rich, more gladdening, more dazzling than that tumult of bells; than that furnace of music; than those ten thousand brazen tones breathed all at once from flutes of stone three hundred feet high; than that city which is but one orchestra; than that symphony rushing and roaring like a tempest."
"Pain has its reasons, pleasure is totally indifferent."
"Genius is nothing but continued attention."
"She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive."
"I live very normally, I go out with my friends, we go to the movies, I queue, we go to restaurants."
"You can express a lot of things, a lot of action without speaking."
"There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul."
"The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it."
"Death is a continuation of my life without me..."
"A young woman has young claws, well sharpened. If she has character, that is. And if she hasn't so much the worse for you."
"... the idea that 'Life' contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written."
"Once my heart was captured, reason was shown the door, deliberately and with a sort of frantic joy. I accepted everything, I believed everything, without struggle, without suffering, without regret, without false shame. How can one blush for what one adores?"
"What it values most of all is the sum total of events and the advance of civilization, which carries individuals along with it; but, indifferent to details, it cares less to have them real than noble or, rather, grand and complete."
"To be successful in my native France, where people speak the same language and understand me, is nothing."
"Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime."
"Order is never observed; it is disorder that attracts attention because it is awkward and intrusive."
"I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should appear like a fool but be wise."
"No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language."
"He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height."
"All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth."
"War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war."
"At last I perceive that in revolutions the supreme power rests with the most abandoned."
"In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate."
"No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist."
"So, sometimes, when I'm not happy with my performance and I have to think, I will think in English."
"I'd even say it's a realistic film because that's the way it happens in our heads; that was the idea."
"And as a child I was filled with passionate admiration for acts of civic courage I had seen performed by an elderly military doctor, who was a friend of my family."
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