Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.
When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.
What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating
Je sais de quelles petitesses meurent les plus grandes amours. I know how pettiness ruins the greatest loves.
What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating.
God is on everyone's side... and in the last analysis, he is on the side with plenty of money and large armies.
However tight I shut my eyes, there will always be a stray dog somewhere in the world who'll stop me being happy.
Death has to be waiting at the end of the ride before you truly see the earth, and feel your heart, and love the world.
Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it.
Our entire life, with our fine moral code and our precious freedom, consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.
Obligations, hatreds, injuries; what did I expect my memories to be? I was forgetting remorse. Now I have a complete past.
Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.
In your efforts to dazzle us your reasoning has gone awry. You know very well that love is, above all, the gift of oneself.
Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?
We have found other terms far less vague than the old ones to designate the same complaints. It's a great advance linguistically.
We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck, and, ask anyone, the house is never burgled, and the ship never goes down.
Life is a child playing round your feet, a tool you hold firmly in your grip, a bench you sit down upon in the evening, in your garden.
Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible-truer than the truth.
All prisons are brimming over with innocence. It is those who cram their fellows into them, in the name of empty ideas, who are the only guilty ones.
To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death.
Il y aura toujours un chien perdu quelque part qui m'empe" chera d'e" tre heureux. There will always be a lost dog somewhere that will prevent me being happy.
Everything ends this way in France — everything. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs — everything is a pretext for a good dinner.
Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated. Begin, and then the work will be completed.
One can make one's life a complete misery, worrying about burglaries and shipwrecks, but ask anyone, anyone you know ... earth-shattering disasters and fabulous inheritances all seems to take place exclusively in the newspapers.
Poor little men, poor little cocks! As soon as they're old enough, they swell their plumage to be conquerors. If they only knew that it's enough to be just a little bit wounded and sad in order to obtain everything without fighting for it.
Chacun de nous a un jour, plus ou moins triste, plus ou moins lointain, o u' il doit enfin accepter d'e" tre un homme. There will come a day for each of us, more or less sad, more or less distant, whenwe must accept the condition of being human.
My wife was an opera singer, you know. She bellowed her way through Wagner as a Valkyrie. I married her and made her give up the theatre, to my eternal cost. She was to go on acting for myself alone. A performance at his own expense, lasting for more than twenty years, tends to wear out your spectator.
Life isn't what you think it is. It's like water, and the young let it trickle away between their fingers without even noticing. Cup your hands, keep it safe. Life eventually becomes something else, something hard, something simple, something you can hold in your hand and nibble on contentedly as you sit in the sun.
It is restful, tragedy, because one knows that there is no more lousy hope left. You know you're caught, caught at last like a rat with all the world on its back. And the only thing left to do is shout - not moan, or complain, but yell out at the top of your voice whatever it was you had to say. What you've never said before. What perhaps you don't even know till now.
Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy - common clay, if you like - eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others - the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes