French Philosopher Quotes

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.

Jean Baudrillard

A man is simple when his chief care is the wish to be what he ought to be, that is honestly and naturally human.

The more clearly a principle is understood by the intellect, the more inexcusable is the neglect to put it into practice.

One knows that frontal and/or profile photography is torn to pieces... Inversely, what remains of the photograph must be seen as a fragment coming to fill a gap in the drawing.

Jean-François Lyotard

Digital messages and images matter less than their instantaneous delivery; the shock effect always wins out over the consideration of the informational content.

Evil is not a mystical principle that can be effaced by a ritual, it is an offence perpetrated on man by man. No one, not even God, can substitute himself for the victim.

Emmanuel Levinas

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 do not yet pretend to have discovered all things, or that what we have discovered can receive no addition; and therefore, pray let us agree, there are yet many things to be done in the ages to come.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

How mighty are the Sabbaths, How mighty and how deep, That the high courts of heaven To everlasting keep.

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.

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

Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald

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

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the interference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature.

Nothing is more human than for man to desire naturally things impossible to his nature. It is, indeed, the property of a nature which is not closed up in matter like the nature of physical things, but which is intellectual or infinitized by the spirit. It is the property of a metaphysical nature. Such desires reach for the infinite, because the intellect thirsts for being and being is infinite.

Jacques Maritain

Government, on their part, are much disposed to favor the establishment of these large companies, and to give them privileges to the detriment of their rivals, and of the public, with the expectation of receiving from them loans, either gratuitous or at a low rate which these never refuse. It is thus that the one sells its protection and the other buys it; and this is already a very great evil.

Antoine Destutt de Tracy

The domain of physics is no proper field for mathematical pastimes. The best security would be in giving a geometrical training to physicists, who need not then have recourse to mathematicians, whose tendency is to despise experimental science.

Much confusion in science, and in everything else, arises from this, that men who have no capacity for thought will presume to theorise, because they cannot see that mere stores of knowledge, however vast, in themselves give no capacity for thinking.

To discover the true principles of morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of gods. They need but common sense. They have only to look within themselves, to reflect upon their own nature, to consult their obvious interests, to consider the object of society and of each of the members who compose it, and they will easily understand that virtue is an advantage, and that vice is an injury to beings of the species.

Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime.

Marquis de Sade

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

Maurice Blanchot

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