French author Quotes

“Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.”

“No doubt it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. That work is already advanced and is making progress every day. But man must be civilized also in relation to nature.”

“Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering - a hell of boredom.”

“Excitement is not enjoyment: in calmness lies true pleasure. The most precious wines are sipped, not bolted at a swallow.”

“A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.”

“Because a fact seems strange to you, you conclude that it is not one. ... All science, however, commences by being strange. Science is successive. It goes from one wonder to another. It mounts by a ladder. The science of to-day would seem extravagant to the science of a former time. Ptolemy would believe Newton mad.”

“A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed.”

“Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.”

“She was a lovely blonde, with fine teeth. She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but her gold was on her head, and her pearls were in her mouth.”

“No one can keep a secret better than a child.”

“Man does not understand nor accept immortality except on condition of self-remembrance.”

“Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings.”

“I think, therefore I doubt.”

“Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.”

“Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.”

“That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.”

“The wise man is he who knows when and how to stop”

“If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.”

“How frightened hypocrisy hastens to defend itself.”

“People do not lack strength; they lack will.”

“Who among us has not sought peace in a song?”

“These two beings, who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so touching a love, and who had lived so long for each other, were now suffering beside one another and through one another; without speaking of it, without harsh feeling, and smiling all the while.”

“Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.”

“I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all.”

“M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town, where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.”