French Translator Quotes

Boris Vian

Prosper Mérimée

Marguerite Yourcenar

J. M. G. Le Clézio

François de Malherbe

Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy

Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends.

Jacques Delille

If man is part and parcel of the universe, and is ruled by the same laws as govern the sky, it is not unreasonable to search the heavens for the patterns of our lives, and for those impersonal attractions which induce our success and our errors.

Marguerite Yourcenar

Was he a sinner? Possibly. But could his class, the bourgeoisie, be condemned as a whole? The Church did not realize how secure he felt when it spoke to him of damnation. Would God send a whole class to hell, the class of the respectable? Who, then, would be in heaven? The common people? That would be hard to imagine!

Bernard Groethuysen

And a rose, she lived as roses do, the space of a morn.

François de Malherbe

I am on the side of those who believe that vice comes from stupidity and consequently that the nearer one draws to wisdom the farther one gets from vice.

Marie de Gournay

A myth is first of all a multistoreyed structure, each story being built according to an identical plan but at a different level of abstraction... The child's tale that is the myth's ground floor, as it were, is just as essential as its metaphysical summit.

Michel Tournier

The desert is so vast that no one can know it all. Men go out into the desert, and they are like ships at sea; no one knows when they will return.

J. M. G. Le Clézio

I would willingly give Thucydides for some authentic memoirs by Aspasia or by a slave of Pericles.

Prosper Mérimée

There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.

It is necessary to note that there are two kinds of chemistry; the one wise and reasonable, even necessary for the extraction of useful remedies from all things in nature.: the other is that foolish and senseless chemistry which is nevertheless the older of the two... The first has been given the name of Chemistry, and the second that of Alchemy.

Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy