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Quotes by French Authors
"A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there - even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity."
"I'm not one to dwell on rehearsal or preparation."
"Intuition makes much of it; I mean by this the faculty of seeing a connection between things that in appearance are completely different; it does not fail to lead us astray quite often."
"To be recognised by a whole country is incredible. This is massive."
"When I was young, my idea was to become a filmmaker."
"I believe there are two periods in life, one for the bike, the other for becoming active on one's work."
"I didn't feel like going any further in this scene with the boy. He was not a professional actor, and if I had pushed the scene any further it would have destroyed the tone of the movie."
"Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides."
"Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature's mandates."
"Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry."
"Because you are a great lord, you believe yourself to be a great genius. You took the trouble to be born, but no more."
"It is easy to understand God as long as you don't try to explain him."
"I think I have handled things pretty well last year and this. What I have to do now is try do it even better."
"Each of us is incomplete compared to someone else - an animal's incomplete compared to a person... and a person compared to God, who is complete only to be imaginary."
"... there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again."
"One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories."
"The working classes were becoming more and more sharply aware of the complex causes of international malaise."
"If triangles had a god, they would give him three sides."
"There are only two cases in which war is just: first, in order to resist the aggression of an enemy, and second, in order to help an ally who has been attacked."
"No one makes a revolution by himself; and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand."
"Quite often in life, when a tragic event arrives it becomes a springboard for mirroring all other things in one's life that one hasn't come to terms with."
"All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost - the most legitimate - passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one."
"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."
"A convention was drawn up on June 17, 1925, in which the principle of supervision, as opposed to that of simple propaganda, was recognized, thanks to the efforts of the labour members, of whom I was one."
"It was tough at the time but when I was younger, my Dad. I would say my Dad, because without him I wouldn't have been here. I mean it was tough for me because he was really demanding. With him, it was never enough, you know, anything I did was never enough."
"We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves."
"To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others."
"Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason is applied."
"It took me time to adjust and to realise it was not going to happen like it did in the juniors."
"Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen."
"If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us."
"If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace."
"Woman's destiny is to be wanton, like the bitch, the she-wolf; she must belong to all who claim her."
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