French Author Quotes

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

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

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

Racism does not limit itself to biology or economics or psychology or metaphysics; it attacks along many fronts and in many forms, deploying whatever is at hand, and even what is not, inventing when the need arises.

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

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

A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.

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

They flattered the ambitious and all the ills came gradually to a head. Murder drowning everything was allowed. Intriguers monopolised all the offices. Good men could only mutter for if they spoke they were lost. Hatred vengeance everything was permitted and nobody dared open his mouth...

Jacques-Louis Ménétra

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.

No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.

Honoré de Balzac

The politician is an acrobat; he keeps his balance by doing the opposite of what he says.

Maurice Barrès

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

What makes equality such a difficult business is that we only want it with our superiors.

A man without wine
Would be dull as a fly
And shortly would die

Pierre Beaumarchais

Youth is the time to study wisdom; old age is the time to practice it.

Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

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

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

Mireille Guiliano

In the beds which the piety of the public has prepared on every side, stricken men await the verdict of fate.

Georges Duhamel

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

O Richard! O my king!
The universe forsakes thee!

Michel-Jean Sedaine

So many women here are ruled by their bodies. All buxom or bony and I don't want a confused woman or a careless woman or a depressed woman, Franck, I want a woman who is entirely under control. How can a woman look after my house and my children if she can't even look after her own body?

He hated the war; it threatened much more than his lifestyle or peace of mind. It continually destroyed the world of the imagination, the only world where he felt happy.

Irène Némirovsky

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

Charles Hamilton Aide