French Philosopher Quotes

It is the liberty that is the mother, not the daughter, of order.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Reason is the torch of friendship, judgment its guide, tenderness its aliment.

Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald

Weakness ever sympathizes with vice, because vice is a weakness which assumes the mask of strength. Madness holds reason in horror, and on all subjects it delights in the exaggerations of falsehood. The cause of all bewitchments, the poison of all philtres, the power of all sorcerers are there.

A collection of errors does not make a truth: quality cannot stem from quantity – a value is not a weight. The reasons of the majority cannot be taken as good reasons.

Alain de Benoist

It is certain that nature inclines us toward the amorous orgy, just as much as toward the gastronomic orgy, and that while both are blameworthy in the excess, they would become praiseworthy in an order in which they could be equilibrated.

Charles Fourier

There is no inconsistency in God's commanding us not to take upon ourselves what belongs to Him alone. For to execute vengeance belongs to none but Him who is Lord of all; for when the powers of the world rightly accomplish this end, God himself does it who appointed them for the purpose.

Anselm of Canterbury

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

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

Alexandre Koyré

Mathematics is merely an auxiliary of science, an appendix to Physics.

Gabriel Jean Edmond Séailles

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

It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all menthat alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms.

Georges Bataille

Waiting is directed at nothing: any object that could gratify it would only efface it. Still, it is not confined to one place, it is not a resigned immobility; it has the endurance of a movement that will never end and would never promise itself the reward of rest; it does not wrap itself in interiority; all of it falls irremediably outside.

Michel Foucault

Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.

Why in the case of the ear, is there withdrawal and turning inward, a making resonant, but in the case of the eye, there is manifestation and display, a making evident?

What philosophy worthy of the name has truly been able to avoid the link between poem and theorem?

How can the intensity of this shame be understood by those who have never experienced it? How can they understand the strength of the motivations produced by the desire to escape from it?

It makes no sense, then, to lay so much emphasis on the constitution of the body to justify the difference between the sexes when differences in mind are much more important.

François Poullain de la Barre

Things never pass where you think, nor along the paths you think

Therefore, since we may say, after such long experience, that religion does not imply exact honesty, we are authorized by the same reasons to think that atheism does not exclude it.

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

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

The universe is full of men going through the same motions in the same surroundings, but carrying within themselves, and projecting around them, universes as mutually remote as the constellations.

Emmanuel Mounier

We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. Our glance can thus take in more things and reach farther than theirs. It is not because our sight is sharper nor our height greater than theirs; it is that we are carried and elevated by the high stature of the giants.

Bernard of Chartres

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

I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always.

The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality... the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, furfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega... critical point simultaneously of emergence and emersion, of maturation and evasion.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin