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Quotes by French Authors
"To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe."
"Rigour is to the mathematician what morality is to men."
"The mistake we make is to attribute to religions the errors and fanaticism of human beings."
"Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well."
"Egypt, the Egypt of antiquity, at a later time, exercised a mysterious fascination over me. I recognized a picture of it immediately, without hesitation and astonishment, in an illustrated magazine."
"But I am sure also that from a political point of view, and from a social point of view the federal link, without infringing the sovereignty of any of the nations which might take part in such as association, could be beneficial."
"I am hoping to film another ad in the summer for Carte Noire."
"You are beautiful, but you are empty. One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you --- the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars; because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or bloated, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose."
"For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity."
"True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary and nothing but what is necessary."
"For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white."
"The dominant invades the entire picture, as it were. In this way I seek to individualize the color, because I have come to believe that there is a living world of each color and I express these worlds."
"Before I do a play I say that I hope it's going to be for as short a time as possible but, once you do it, it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It's like a drug."
"On completion of my military service, I went back to the factory and to the trade union."
"My books were always full of ink blots, always stained and covered with smeared sketches and pictures, which one draws idly when his attention wanders from his task."
"I will be better in Monte Carlo than I was in Phoenix. If I can't win maybe I will lead 50 laps."
"War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there."
"Well it is sometimes difficult to act in another language."
"I was excellent. Everybody loved me. I love myself, and I like bums."
"On a grassroots level we say that man can touch more than he can grasp."
"There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them."
"I would not go so far as to say that the French trade unions attached greater importance to the struggle for peace than the others did; but they certainly seemed to take it more to heart."
"When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome."
"Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds."
"You cannot of yourself move your arm or alter your position, situation, posture, do to other men good or evil, or effect the least change in the world."
"On the morrow the horizon was covered with clouds- a thick and impenetrable curtain between earth and sky, which unhappily extended as far as the Rocky Mountains. It was a fatality!"
"To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts."
"But someone like Claude Chabrol tries to make a connection between the society in which we live and the social reasons which make monsters out of some people."
"I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul."
"A Truth is the subjective development of that which is at once both new and universal. New: that which is unforeseen by the order of creation. Universal: that which can interest, rightly, every human individual, according to his pure humanity."
"Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire."
"When you're an actor, actually, you shouldn't come up with too many ideas."
"I'm not pessimistic about people in general, but only about the way they live."
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