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Quotes by French Authors
"The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death."
"Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism."
"All these buildings are like mountains I would like to climb, but I am forbidden."
"He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool."
"Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine."
"An ancient dictum says that when Zeus wanted to destroy someone, he would first drive him mad."
"Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends."
"Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth."
"The sense of smell explores; deleterious substances almost always have an unpleasant smell."
"Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price."
"To doubt everything, or, to believe everything, are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection."
"Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love."
"France needs to find something that makes it stand out. It's not enough for it to do almost as well as its neighbors."
"It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all."
"Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal."
"Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty."
"Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows."
"Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it."
"Courage! I have shown it for years; think you I shall lose it at the moment when my sufferings are to end?"
"Tyranny is always better organized than freedom."
"I am convinced that our movement will be more demoralized and weakened by blind and uncritical admiration than by frank admission of past mistakes."
"At a young age winning is not the most important thing... the important thing is to develop creative and skilled players with good confidence."
"You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience."
"We may seem great in an employment below our worth, but we very often look little in one that is too big for us."
"In other words, a democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it."
"Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization."
"Nine tenths of education is encouragement."
"The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same."
"There is no original truth, only original error."
"The anarchist painter is not the one who will create anarchist pictures, but the one who will fight with all his individuality against official conventions."
"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."
"True philosophy invents nothing; it merely establishes and describes what is."
"Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry."
"In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself."
"When France resolved, along with England, to lend assistance in the legitimate defense of Poland, the realization burst on us that a conflict of awesome proportions was inevitable."
"However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: for the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white."
"In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end."
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