French Quotes

I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.

Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.

Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.

Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.

The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.

Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.

A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.

I think; therefore I am.

The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.

An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?

Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.

These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.

The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.

The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn't put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

My most resolute opponents believe that I am too visible, that I am a little too alive, that my name echoes too much in the texts which they nevertheless claim to be inaccessible.

In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.

If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

I have always had trouble recognizing myself in the features of the intellectual playing his political role according to the screenplay that you are familiar with and whose heritage deserves to be questioned.

I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.

Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.

In philosophy, you have to reckon with the implicit level of an accumulated reserve, and thus with a very great number of relays, with the shared responsibility of these relays.

I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.