French Historian Quotes

Jules Michelet

Pierre de Coubertin

Alexis de Tocqueville

François Guizot

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

Marc Bloch

Hippolyte Taine

The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals.

Goncourt brothers

The point in geometry is like the unit in arithmetic and the molecule in matter.

Whoever considers the number of absurd and ridiculous oaths necessary to be taken at present in most countries, on being admitted into any society or profession whatever, will be less surprised to find prevarication still prevailing, where perjury has led the way.

Guillaume Thomas François Raynal

It is useful to ask oneself questions, but very dangerous to answer them.

Charles Seignobos

Science begins by giving names; it then reasons on those names. It shuts itself up in abstractions as in a dark room; sometimes a sudden perception, like a flash of lightning, discovers a corner of reality; then Night, darker than ever, resumes its sway.

Gabriel Hanotaux

If we look at the parpens piled up on the building site or at the block of bronze, nothing about them manifests that they are suited to being a house or a statue.... Aristotle speaks of the materials considered as such in terms of "the buildable" (I, 201a 16, b Bf), coining an adjective whose suffix expresses capacity (what he calls dunamis). This capacity, as we have seen, cannot be grasped after the manner of that with which perception provides us (color, hardness, etc.); it requires a gaze capable of probing more deeply, of proceeding from the real to the possible—as when Michelangelo "sees" a David in the formless block abandoned by other sculptors.

Olympism is not a system - it is a state of mind. This state of mind has emerged from a double cult: that of effort and that of Eurythmy - a taste of excess and a taste of measure combined.

Pierre de Coubertin

A corrupted and weakened community breaks down in immense catastrophes; the iron harrow of revolutions crushes men like the clods of the field; but, in the blood-stained furrows germinates a new generation, and the soul aggrieved, believes again.

François Guizot

To have a true idea of man or of life, one must have stood himself on the brink of suicide, or on the door-sill of insanity, at least once.

Hippolyte Taine

A "Crucial Experiment" is Impossible in Physics.

The highest and most lofty trees have the most reason to dread the thunder.

In democracies, nothing is more great or more brilliant than commerce: it attracts the attention of the public, and fills the imagination of the multitude; all energetic passions are directed towards it.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Improvement depends far less upon length of tasks and hours of application than is supposed. Children can take in but a little each day; they are like vases with a narrow neck; you may pour little or pour much, but much will not enter at a time.

They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. Walking follows them: 'I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name.'

Michel de Certeau

Each science, taken by itself, represents but a fragment of the universal march toward knowledge.

It was in Nazi Germany that Bolshevism was perfected; there political power truly absorbed all spheres of existence, from the economy to religion, from technology to the soul. The irony, the tragedy, of history was that both totalitarian regimes, identical in their aim for absolute power over dehumanized beings, presented themselves as protection from the danger presented by the other.

François Furet

This means that they are bound by law and custom to plough the fields of their masters, harvest the corn, gather it into barns, and thresh and winnow the grain; they must also mow and carry home the hay, cut and collect wood, and perform all manner of tasks of this kind.

Just like the writer who has finished his book and illuminates it with gold and azure, so the king illuminated his kingdom with the beautiful abbeys he made.

Jean de Joinville

To understand what has happened, and even what will happen we have only to examine what is happening.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

The earth is, like our own skin, fated to carry the scars of ancient wounds.

Fernand Braudel

Roy Ascott was among the first artists to launch an appeal for total spectator participation: for him, the strict antinomy between action and contemplation needed to be abolished.