French Philosopher Quotes

Voltaire

René Descartes

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Paul Sartre

Albert Camus

Denis Diderot

Simone de Beauvoir

Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I am accustomed to distinguish two things in the mathematics, the history and the science. By history I mean what is already discovered, and is committed to books. And by the science, the skill of resolving all questions.

René Descartes

As long as men are liable to die and desirous to live, a physician will be made fun of, but he will be well paid.

Jean de La Bruyère

Brutes are deprived of the high advantages which we have; but they have some which we have not. They have not our hopes, but theyare without our fears; they are subject like us to death, but without knowing it; even most of them are more attentive than we to self-preservation, and do not make so bad a use of their passions.

In this loveless everyday life eroticism is a substitute for love.

At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two, they would cut each other's throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.

I am much afraid that we shall have very greatly hastened the decline and ruin of the New World by our contagion, and that we willhave sold it our opinions and our arts very dear.

Michel de Montaigne

It should be pointed out for our own guidance in the West that the continual signing of manifestoes and protests is one of the surest ways of undermining the efficacy and dignity of the intellectual. There exists a permanent blackmail that we all know and that we must have the often solitary courage to resist.

My studies gave me only a very superficial knowledge of philosophy but sharpened my interest in it. I benefited greatly from being a teacher—that is, from being able to spend a great deal of time reading, writing and educating myself.

Simone de Beauvoir

The animal is a system of different organic molecules, which, impelled by dim sensations similar to those of obtuse and vague touch - sensations which have been imparted to them by Him who created matter in general - have combined, until each has found the position most suitable to its form and to its repose.

Every time that a man who is not an absolute fool presents you with a
question he considers very problematic after giving it careful thought,
distrust those quick answers that come to the mind of someone who has
considered it only briefly or not at all. These answers are usually
simplistic views lacking in consistency, which explain nothing, or which do
not bear examination.

Joseph de Maistre

We ought all to make an effort to act on our first thoughts and let our unspoken gratitude find expression. Then there will be more sunshine in the world, and more power to work for what is good.

Albert Schweitzer

Nature responds only to questions posed in mathematical language, because nature is the domain of measure and order.

Alexandre Koyré

Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed)

Maurice Blanchot

L'esprot n'a point de sexe. The mind has no sex.

François Poullain de la Barre

The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.

Bernard-Henri Lévy

The image can only be studied through the image, by dreaming images as they gather in reverie. It is a non-sense to claim to study imagination objectively since one really receives the image only if he admires it. Already in comparing one image to another, one runs the risk of losing participation in its individuality.

Gaston Bachelard

All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X', a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction', is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third-person present indicative: S is P.

Jacques Derrida

Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me

A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence.

Jean-François Revel

Necessary, since every moment in our lives is marked by death, like a shadow from another realm, it appear to us like a vanishing point for everything. How can one meditate on live without meditating too on its brevity, its precariousness, its fragility?

André Comte-Sponville

I am not innocent. Innocence is a science of the sublime. And I am only at the very beginning of the apprenticeship.

Hélène Cixous

The machine is a slave which serves to make other slaves. Such a domineering and enslaving drive may go together with the quest for human freedom. But it is difficult to liberate oneself by transferring slavery to other beings, men, animals, or machines; to rule over a population of machines subjecting the whole world means still to rule, and all rule implies acceptance of schemata of subjection.

Gilbert Simondon

Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty