top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by French Authors
"In revolutions authority remains with the greatest scoundrels."
"She's an absolute idiot! she added with the wisdom invariably shown by people who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus."
"I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run."
"It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them."
"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction."
"I love mirrors. They let one pass through the surface of things."
"We are well aware of the task ahead of us in what will be a very difficult match but which we all dream of playing."
"In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact."
"I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat."
"Before, for me, peace could have been synonymous with boredom."
"I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering."
"Always keep your smile. That's how I explain my long life."
"Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils."
"I love you all too much, it's one of just of my problems."
"I don't know if you ever say to yourself that you want to be an actress. It eventually becomes a social function - you are an actress and you make a living out of it, but at the beginning it's more a matter of how to survive, or how to exist in a certain way."
"But, you know, when I choose a film I need to believe in it and believe I can do something special with it, and after a while that means not trying to judge or analyze why I should do it. You have to follow this intuition thing, which is a mystery to me."
"Fortune is a great deceiver. She sells very dear the things she seems to give us."
"In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team."
"I admire directors so much, I find them incredible: they manage such a huge number of people of different characters, think of the money involved."
"Conversation would be vastly improved by the constant use of four simple words: I do not know."
"Of course I'll hurt you. Of course you'll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence."
"I am a good Protestant, and in the full sense of the term, for from the bottom of my soul, I protest against everything that is said, and everything that is done."
"Variety, multiplicity are the two most powerful vehicles of lust."
"Film is a very young art that is still evolving. Soon, we shall reach a balance between content and technology."
"Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction."
"Sport is the habitual and voluntary cultivation of intensive physical effort."
"My sister and my brother, of whom I have not spoken before, were considerably older than I; it seemed almost as if we belonged to different generations."
"The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows."
"To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them."
"Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness."
"The theatre is the involuntary reflex of the ideas of the crowd."
bottom of page