French Quotes

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.

First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.

There is nothing is more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little - the book of Nature.

People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?

Music is the silence between the notes.

Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.

Extreme complication is contrary to art.

Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

In opera, there is always too much singing.

I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.

A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.

The dark outside world of Paris under German occupation exerted a strong containing pressure.

The Cowles Commission was the optimal environment for the type of research that I wanted to do.

In the mid-'60s in Berkeley, the theory of measure spaces of economic agents became one of my main interests.

I had become interested in economics, an interest that was transformed into a lifetime dedication when I met with the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium.

Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other.

As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live.

All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.