French Journalist Quotes

Gaston Leroux

Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

Blaise Cendrars

François-Noël Babeuf

Charb

Alphonse Karr

Émile Gaboriau

The best way to renew thought is to go outside the human imagination.

Luck means the hardships and privations which you have not hesitated to endure, the long nights you have devoted to work. Luck means the appointments you have never failed to keep; the trains you have never failed to catch.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Blaise Cendrars

The day when the Jew was first admitted to civil rights, the Christian state was in danger...the entrance of the Jew into {White) society marked the destruction of the State, meaning by State, the Christian State.

I confess today in good faith that I am angry with myself for having formerly seen in a bad light, within the revolutionary government, Robespierre and Saint-Just. I believe that these two men were better on their own than all the revolutionaries together.

François-Noël Babeuf

It is Astronomy that reveals to us the Universe in its majestic whole; it is she who has made us comprehend its structure, and after having gathered its thousand various elements into a gorgeous picture, has initiated us into the eternal laws that govern the Heavens.

Amédée Guillemin

Yes, yes," said the Beast, "my heart is good, but still I am a monster." Among mankind," says Beauty, "there are many that deserve that name more than you, and I prefer you, just as you are, to those, who, under a human form, hide a treacherous, corrupt, and ungrateful heart.

Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont

I did not want to be taken for a fool-the typical French reason for performing the worst of deeds without remorse.

Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

A father is the one friend upon whom we can always rely. In the hour of need, when all else fails, we remember him upon whose knees we sat when children, and who soothed our sorrows; and even though he may be unable to assist us, his mere presence serves to comfort and strengthen us.

Émile Gaboriau

If we live constantly with the same ideas, if we see only one, passionately desired object, we become unaware of how criminal are our desires. Naturally I had no wish to cause my father distress; yet I desired the very thing that would distress him most.

Raymond Radiguet

Real excellence and humility are consequently not incompatible one with the other; on the contrary, they are twin sisters.

Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

She couldn't imagine why there was such a difference between those children and her. She couldn't imagine why she and all these other people with her had to be treated this way. Who decided this, and what for?

Tatiana de Rosnay

The real us present, and it is transfigured... It is everywhere a reality at once immutable and changing. Matter is present, submitted to a luminous phantasmagoria. What Monet paints is the space that exists between himself and things.

Gustave Geffroy

Flowing water is at once a picture and a music, which causes to flow at the same time from my brain, like a limpid and murmuring rivulet, sweet thoughts, charming reveries, and melancholy remembrances.

The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage uniforms, who would not be put on display, but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That's the army in which I should like to fight.

When we are not rich enough to be able to purchase happiness, we must not approach too near and gaze on it in shop windows.

Tristan Bernard

To marry a woman you love and who loves you is to lay a wager with her as to who will stop loving the other first.

Marseilles isn't a city for tourists. There's nothing to see. Its beauty can't be photographed. It can only be shared. It's a place where you have to take sides, be passionately for or against. Only then can you see what there is to see. And you realize, too late, that you're in the middle of a tragedy. An ancient tragedy in which the hero is death. In Marseilles, even to lose you have to know how to fight.

Jean-Claude Izzo

Rumor, once started, rushes on like a river, until it mingles with, and is lost in the sea.

Antoine de Rivarol

The new friends whom we make after attaining a certain age and by whom we would fain replace those whom we have lost, are to our old friends what glass eyes, false teeth and wooden legs are to real eyes, natrual teeth and legs of flesh and bone.

Nicolas Chamfort

For fascists, just as for capitalists, wealth must be concentrated in fewer hands, and money may circulate across borders without constraint while ordinary people may not.

Gilbert Mercier

It is only on the basis of the probable and the apparent that men bereft of a sixth sense are able to sit in judgment over other men.

Muhammad isn't sacred to me. I don't blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I live under French law. I don't live under Quranic law.

The poor are the human manure in which grow the harvests of life, the harvests of joy which the rich reap.

None will ever be a true Parisian who has not learned to wear a mask of gaiety over his sorrows and one of sadness, boredom, or indifference over his inward joy.