French Quotes

I've only got one wrinkle, and I'm sitting on it.

Always keep your smile. That's how I explain my long life.

The 'Western' is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.

There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought.

The antiquity and general acceptance of an opinion is not assurance of its truth.

Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.

It is pure illusion to think that an opinion that passes down from century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false.

I know too much to be a sceptic and too little to be a dogmatist.

I am a good Protestant, and in the full sense of the term, for from the bottom of my soul, I protest against everything that is said, and everything that is done.

It is thus tolerance that is the source of peace, and intolerance that is the source of disorder and squabbling.

We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.

You are born modern, you do not become so.

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.

There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other's heart.

The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.

Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.