French Essayist Quotes

Marcel Proust

André Gide

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles

Charles Péguy

Léon Bloy

Alain Finkielkraut

Luc de Clapiers

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.

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

The true character of epistolary style is playfulness and urbanity.

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.

We are not indeed obliged always to speak what we think, but we must always think what we speak.

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles

Formerly, leaders of states practiced realism, but did not honor it… With them morality was violated, but moral notions remained intact. … The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with a system of morality.

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 life of the honest man must be an apostasy and a perpetual desertion. The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself continually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors. And the man who wishes to remain faithful to justice must make himself continually unfaithful to inexhaustibly triumphant injustices.

When you ask God to send you trials, you may be sure your prayer will be granted.

They say that there is no reality before it has been given shape by words rules regulations. They say that in what concerns them everything has to be remade starting from basic principles. They say that in the first place the vocabulary of every language is to be examined, modified, turned upside down, that every word must be screened.

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

Go your way, seducers, flatterers, idlers, those glib of tongue and charlatans; I am not a seed that you can force to grow; my goal differs so from yours that I would be wasting my time in trying to explain where my inclination drives me.

Dominique Fernandez