French Author Quotes

There is only one proper way to wear a beautiful dress: to forget you are wearing it.

Delphine de Girardin

For I think that it's just as much good sense, if one can keep to the point, as to twist my words round each other.

Giraut de Bornelh

When one has one good day in the year, one is not wholly unfortunate.

Marguerite de Navarre

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

Michel-Jean Sedaine

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

One can make one's life a complete misery, worrying about burglaries and shipwrecks, but ask anyone, anyone you know... earth-shattering disasters and fabulous inheritances all seems to take place exclusively in the newspapers.

One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.

Alfred de Vigny

Be good, be young, be true! Evil is nothing but vanity, let us have the pride of good, and above all let us never despair.

Alexandre Dumas, fils

Naught else but empty shadows are our dreams,
Reflected from the day's imaginings.

Giovanni Rucellai

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

Philippe Quinault

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

A single nation that has succeeded in lowering the intelligence, the morality, the quality of the human race almost throughout the globe is a phenomenon never before experienced since the beginning of time. I accuse the United States of being in a constant state of crime against humanity.

Henry de Montherlant

Marquis: Put a duck on a lake in the midst of some swans, and you'll see he'll miss his pond and eventually return to it.
Montrichard: Longing to be back in the mud!

He is the happiest who renders the greatest number happy.

Joseph-François-Édouard de Corsembleu

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

I know everything, but I don't understand any of it.

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

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?

Women, rouse yourselves! The tocsin of reason resounds through the whole universe: recognize your rights. The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudices, fanaticism, superstition and lies.

Olympe de Gouges

There is no mystery about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. They were not written by Shakespeare at all. They were all written by a total stranger, about whom all we know is that he was called Shakespeare.

Alphonse Allais

No one is satisfied with his fortune,
nor dissatisfied with his intellect

Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde Deshoulières

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

Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian

I am God, says Love, for Love is God and God is Love, and this Soul is God by the condition of Love. I am God by divine nature and this Soul is God by the condition of Love. Thus this precious beloved of mine is taught and guided by me, without herself, for she is transformed into me, and such a perfect one, says Love, takes my nourishment.

Marguerite Porete

Time is a great ocean which, like the other ocean, overflows with our remains.

Alphonse de Lamartine

If wine were to disappear from human production, I believe it would cause an absence, a failure in health and intellect, a void much more terrifying than all the recesses and the deviations for which wine is regarded as responsible.

Charles Baudelaire