French Author Quotes

Victor Hugo

Jules Verne

Marcel Proust

Alexandre Dumas

Jean Cocteau

Stendhal

André Gide

So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days.

The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers.

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

The distance between the earth and her satellite is a mere trifle, and undeserving of serious consideration. I am convinced that before twenty years are over one-half of our earth will have paid a visit to the moon.

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.

I love Germany so dearly that I hope there will always be two of them.

François Mauriac

Beautiful... as the fortuitous encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.

Comte de Lautréamont

There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

It is better to waste one's youth than to do nothing with it at all.

Georges Courteline

The physician has a sacred mission on earth; and to fulfill it he begins at the source of life, and goes down to the mysterious darkness of the tomb.

Alexandre Dumas

The public always prefers to be reassured. There are those whose job this is. There are only too many.

You can pretend to be serious but you can't pretend to be witty.

An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Misery's fine - as long as you know you can get out of it when you want to.

I do not like to sleep when your body lies against mine at night, for I think of death which comes so quickly to put us thoroughly to sleep.

Our fate is shaped from within ourselves outward, never from without inward.

Jacques Lusseyran

Expensive clothes with inappropriate or inexpensive shoes may send an unflattering message.

Mireille Guiliano

DeMaistre and Bonald … wanted to teach men submission, to give them the religion of established power, to substitute, in Bonald's phrase, the evidence of authority for the authority of evidence.

Alain Finkielkraut

Success, which is not always a proof of merit, depends more often on the choice of a subject than on its execution.

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

When liberty, this austere goddess,
Comes down to console people on earth;
That she finds them seated, in their heavy troubles,
On a ground cracked a thousand and four hundred years ago,
Her work which everywhere encounters a rebellious ground
Is very laborious before emerging beautiful

Auguste-Marseille Barthélemy

I sit beside my lonely fire
And pray for wisdom yet:
For calmness to remember
Or courage to forget.

Charles Hamilton Aide

Some people measure the worth of good actions only by their natural qualities or their difficulty, given the preference to what is conspicuous or brilliant... The dignity and difficulty of a good action certainly affects what is technically called its accidental worth, but all its essential worth comes from love alone.

Jean-Pierre Camus

Mercury. Kills the patient with the disease.

Gustave Flaubert

I always have a pad of paper and a pencil within reach, to catch on the wing this turn of phrase which strikes me as felicitous, that idea which I hope to be able to examine more closely in the light of day.

Roger Martin du Gard