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.

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 history of men is reflected in the history of sewers.

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.

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

Love's pleasure lasts but a moment;
Love's sorrow lasts all through life.

Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian

Whoever has but a moment to live has nothing more to hide.

Philippe Quinault

I have so fiercely dreamed of you And walked so far and spoken of you so, Loved a shade of you so hard That now I've no more left of you.

In times gone by there lived a Count of Ponthieu, who loved chivalry and the pleasures of the world beyond measure, and moreover was a stout knight and a gallant gentleman

Marie de France

Medicine is a rich soil but it doesn't yield its harvest unaided.

Father died last year. I don't subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.

Michel Houellebecq

Friendship is dead:
They were friends who go with the wind,
And the wind was blowing at my door.

I die of thirst beside the fountain
I'm hot as fire, I'm shaking tooth on tooth
In my own country I'm in a distant land
Beside the blaze I'm shivering in flames

François Villon