French Author Quotes

Victor Hugo

Jules Verne

Marcel Proust

Alexandre Dumas

Jean Cocteau

Stendhal

André Gide

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

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.

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

Comte de Lautréamont

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

Georges Courteline

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.

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

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.

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

François Mauriac

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.

For, to make deserts, God, who rules mankind, Begins with kings, and ends the work by wind.

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

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

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

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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

In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a mistake.

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

Mutual content is like a river, which must have its banks on either side.

Alain-René Lesage

First we must see that we cannot will ourselves to be open because openness is our very nature. Any tiny residue of willing, of wanting to be open takes us away from what we are. Willing never goes beyond willing. So the only way to be free from this circle is to glimpse the truth that openness is the egoless state, that it is here and now

Jean Klein (spiritual teacher)

Jackals can only howl while the lion devours.

Schools everywhere have always confined themselves to making students learn techniques and write essays, while proscribing treading for pleasure. It seems to be established in perpetuity, in every part of the world, that enjoyment has no part to play in the curriculum, and that knowledge can only be the fruit of suffering.

Followers of trails and of seasons, breakers of camp in the little dawn wind, seekers of watercourses over the wrinkled rind of the world, o seekers, o finders of reasons to be up and be gone....

Saint-John Perse

Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright.

Georges Bernanos

We must not be timid from a fear of committing faults: the greatest fault of all is to deprive oneself of experience.

Luc de Clapiers

The Raelian Movement is an atheistic religion that perfectly merges science and spirituality, and it includes many female priests. Men and women must rise above their previous cultural conditioning and look to the future with a new awareness encompassing beauty and femininity.

The strong ones among humans do nothing. They talk and talk again.