French Philosopher Quotes

Voltaire

René Descartes

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Paul Sartre

Albert Camus

Denis Diderot

Simone de Beauvoir

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Maurice Blanchot

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

Alexandre Koyré

The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.

Bernard-Henri Lévy

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

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

François Poullain de la Barre

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hélène Cixous

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

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

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon