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Quotes by French Authors
"When you left on Saturday, I felt a horrible void, I saw you everywhere, on the beach, in your room, in the garden: impossible for me to get used to the idea that you had left."
"Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness."
"Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent."
"What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find."
"Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions."
"Fate is not in man but around him."
"(About Sartre...)His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long."
"Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature."
"Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from."
"When Jean and his mother left Etreuilles, Monsieur Sureau had gathered for them great boxfuls of hawthorn and of snowballs which Madame Santeuil had not the courage to refuse. But, as soon as Jean's uncle had gone home, she threw them away, saying that they already had more than enough in the way of luggage. And then Jean cried because he had been separated from the darling creatures which he would have liked to take with him to Paris, and because of his mother's naughtiness."
"When Joan D' Arc was asked by her judges why as a Christian she did not love the British, she answered that she did love them, but she loved British in their country. In the same way, we do not hate the Turks, we love them, but in their country."
"There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth."
"Gratitude is a burden, and every burden is made to be shaken off."
"Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere."
"When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics."
"The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in."
"In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish."
"Taste, which enables us to distinguish all that has a flavor from that which is insipid."
"Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician."
"The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity."
"The universe is asymmetric and I am persuaded that life, as it is known to us, is a direct result of the asymmetry of the universe or of its indirect consequences. The universe is asymmetric."
"Man's mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain."
"I probably went to musique concrete concerts - though not the very first ones - at the beginning of the 50s."
"You know, my role as Vice Chairman is a lot less tiring than playing matches every three days."
"I don't want to say anything because I know I am unable to protect you from the harm that I see."
"We must have our say, not through violence, aggression or fear. We must speak out calmly and forcefully. We shall only be able to enter the new world era if we agree to engage in dialogue with the other side."
"Luxury ruins republics; poverty, monarchies."
"For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy."
"Who knows what happens tomorrow? We'll find it tomorrow."
"Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn't go too fast. The subject must forget about you. Then, however, you must be very quick."
"Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of soul, impossible."
"It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory."
"Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery."
"When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you."
"These three movements were born spontaneously and independently of the initiative of a few French patriots who had a place in the old political groups and parties."
"Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations."
"I think that witnessing ecological problems visible from space is one of the new and essential roles of astronauts."
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