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Quotes by French Authors
"No idea can succeed except at the expense of sacrifice; no one ever escapes without enduring strain from the struggle of life."
"All it takes is a single act of aggression to permanently wound a nation's reputation."
"The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real."
"When I first see the dailies, I look only at myself, but then you start to see the scene."
"We should keep silent about those in power; to speak well of them almost implies flattery; to speak ill of them while they are alive is dangerous, and when they are dead is cowardly."
"There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice."
"All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last."
"Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It's a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in a place where you would not have expected to find it."
"I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products."
"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
"The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything."
"The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman."
"No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity."
"Between an uncontrolled escalation and passivity, there is a demanding road of responsibility that we must follow."
"He recognised that all the period of Odette's life which had elapsed before she first met him, a period of which he had never sought to form any picture in his mind, was not the featureless abstraction which he could vaguely see, but had consisted of so many definite, dated years, each crowded with concrete incidents. But were he to learn more of them, he feared lest her past, now colourless, fluid and supportable, might assume a tangible, an obscene form, with individual and diabolical features. And he continued to refrain from seeking a conception of it, not any longer now from laziness of mind, but from fear of suffering."
"In great affairs we ought to apply ourselves less to creating chances than to profiting from those that are offered."
"I'm very aware of what you're talking about as I was involved with the radio in Africa in the same period as I was doing Concrete - I was doing both at the same time."
"Man has but three events in his life: to be born, to live, and to die. He is not conscious of his birth, he suffers at his death and he forgets to live."
"Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again."
"Courage is like love it must have hope for nourishment."
"In the '70s I was in exile; every time I went back I wondered if they'd take my passport away."
"Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he who is very pious is slightly sanctimonious; there are just as many vices to virtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes."
"I wanted to show a normal young girl whose only difference was that she behaved in the way a boy might, without any sense of guilt on a moral or sexual level."
"Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker."
"We would like UN resolutions to be enforced, including on Iraq."
"Everybody is ambitious. The question is whether he is ambitious to be or ambitious to do."
"I'm very aware that to reach the same level and have the same amount of success will be extremely difficult."
"The ultimate triumph of philosophy would be to cast light upon the mysterious ways in which Providence moves to achieve the designs it has for man."
"We shall find in our troubled hearts, where discord reigns, two needs which seem at variance, but which merge, as I think, in a common source - the love of the true, and the love of the fabulous."
"Time is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at and who steals what is most precious to men."
"The single currency should allow the European Union, and therefore France, to balance its monetary strength with the United States. It should help us adjust to the development of China."
"When you direct your first film, you always start by telling stories that you are familiar with."
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