French Critic Quotes

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

Joachim Du Bellay

Émile Faguet

In an age of synthetic images and synthetic emotions, the chances of an accidental encounter with reality are remote indeed.

Let a single completed action, all in one place, all in one day, keep the theatre packed to the end of your play.

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

Happy he who like Ulysses has made a great journey, or like that man who won the Fleece and then came home, full of experience and good sense, to live the rest of his time among his family!

Joachim Du Bellay

On Rousseau's 'Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains':

It would be equally correct to say that sheep are born carnivorous, and everywhere they nibble grass.

The cinema gives us a substitute world which fits our desires.

If I had a device, it would be the true, the true only, leaving the beautiful and the good to settle matters afterwards as best they could.

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

At about six in the morning of July 3, 1860, while I was watering my petunias, and thinking of nothing in particular, I perceived coming towards me, a tall, beardless, fair-haired young fellow, wearing a German cap and gold-rimmed spectacles.

Edmond François Valentin About