Novelists From France

"Among the idle rich, boredom is one of the most common causes of unhappiness. People who have difficulty in earning their living may suffer greatly, but they are not bored. Wealthy men and women become bored when they depend upon the theater for their enjoyment instead of making their own lives interesting."

"The best way to honor friends who have died is to treat our living ones with equal affection."

"There is no happiness without forgetfulness. I have never known a real man of action to be unhappy during action. How could he be? Like a child at play, he stops thinking of himself."

"For intelligent people, action often means escape from thought, but it is a reasonable and a wise escape."

"Choose a community to live in whose efforts lie in the same direction as your own and where there will be interest in your activities. Instead of living in conflict with your family, who in your opinion do not understand you, and in the conflict destroying your happiness and that of others, seek out friends who think as you do. If you are religious, live among believers; if you are a revolutionary, live among your own kind. You can still try to convince the skeptical, and in this you will have the support of those who are in agreement with you."

"It is wrongly held by many that to be happy one must have the admiration and respect of a great many people; but the esteem of one's own circle is essential. Stéphane Mallarmé, deeply beloved by a few disciples, was far happier than a celebrated man who knows that his reputation is questioned by those whom he admires. The monastery had brought peace to innumerable souls through its singleness of thought and purpose."

"Obviously the future must be considered in the light of one's own power to influence events. The man of action cannot be a fatalist. The architect has to think of the future of the house he is building; a workman has to take measure for safeguarding his old age; a member of the Chamber has to consider the possible effects of the budget for which he is going to vote. But once decisions are made and measures taken, peace of mind must be re-established. It is absurd to try to foresee things when the means of doing it are lacking."

"When one is already happy it is important not to lose the virtues which have produced happiness. When they are successful, many men and women forget prudence, moderation, and kindness — qualities which were instrumental in their success. They are arrogant or thoughtless; an excessive self-confidence prevents them from accomplishing difficult tasks, and they soon become unworthy of their good fortune. They are surprised when their luck changes from good to bad. The ancient practice of sacrifice to the gods in return for happiness was a wise one. Polycrates, Tyrant of Samos, threw his precious ring into the sea as a sacrifice, and there are several ways of throwing the ring of Polycrates into the sea. The simplest is to be modest."

"He who has not spent hours, days, or years with someone he loves cannot know what happiness is, for he is unable to imagine a protracted miracle like this — one which makes out of ordinary sights and events the most enchanted existence."

"An unsatisfied woman requires luxury, but a woman who is in love with a man will lie on a board."

"It is true that in thus giving his love to fragile beings man becomes more vulnerable. He who passionately loves a woman, children, or his country gives hostages to fortune. He will be tortured from then on, though he be in good health, put down though he be powerful, forced to ask for mercy though he be courageous and hardened to suffering. Fortune has him in her grasp. He is forced to watch with burning anxiety the sickness of those he love tenderly — a suffering far worse than that caused by any malady of his own, because his physical powers are intact. He wants to help, but feels utterly useless. He would like to surrender himself instead of his precious hostages, and sickness — arrogant and tyrannical — chooses its victims relentlessly. In spite of himself he feels like a coward and a traitor, because he has escaped. This is the cruellest of all human torments."

"One of the most serious obstacles to happiness is the awkwardness of modern man, with his mind full of doctrines and abstract formulas, when he attempts to re-establish contact with real emotions. Animals and unsophisticated people achieve happiness more naturally, because their desires are simpler and truer. Civilized man, a parrot enslaved by his chattering, ceaselessly inoculates himself with loves and hatreds which he does not actually fee."

"There is no permanent equilibrium in human affairs. Faith, wisdom, and art allow one to attain it for a time; then outside influences and the souls' passions destroy it, and one must climb the rock again in he same manner. This vacillation round a fixed point is life, and the certainty that such a point exists is happiness. As the most ardent love, of one analyses its separate moments, is made up of innumerable minute conflicts settled invariably by fidelity, so happiness, if one reduces it to its important elements, is made up of struggles and anguish, and always saved by hope."

"In this lack of diplomatic preparation and in this abandonment of Europe to German hegemony the responsibility of Great Britain was at least as great as that of France. Many powerful groups were united in restraining Great Britain from adopting a courageous and foresighted foreign policy. The bankers of the City were concerned about the money they had loaned to Germany and they persisted in the naïve hope that they could do business with a country that was shouting from the roof tops its intention to be self-sufficient. A certain number of persons of importance in England, terrified by Bolshevism, believed foolishly they had found in Nazism a barrier to the Revolution. At the same time the intellectual liberals were preaching peace at any price and unilateral disarmament, which was destined to be the death of liberalism. All these tendencies combined magnificently to play into the hands of Germany."

"Today one can say that that war was lost, so far as France was concerned, at the very moment it was begun. It was lost because we did not have enough airplanes, or enough tanks, or enough anti-aircraft guns and because we did not have enough factories to build what we lacked. It was lost because our Ally had only a tiny army and did not possess the means of expansion which would have permitted him to take quick advantage of his immense reserves of men and riches."

"We English," Lord Tyrrell, Ambassador to France, said to me about 1930, "we English, after the war, made two mistakes: we believed the French, because they had been victorious, had become Germans, and we believed the Germans, through some mysterious transmutation, had become Englishmen."

"In 1936 at the time when the German troops had reoccupied the Rhineland in defiance of the Treaty of Locarno, English public opinion, drunk with pacifism, had refused to support us. "Why should we?" an English politician said to me. "The Germans can do what they like in their own back garden.""

"From the day of the Armistice England had wanted nothing but to return to her well-kept lawns, her country houses, her sports, her traditional way of life, and she turned a deaf ear to all talk of armaments and fighting. Her professors taught the youth of the country that war was a survival of barbarism and could easily be eliminated. They did not tell their pupils that unless force is used to sustain justice injustice will triumph."

"In attaching so much importance to the idea of the League of Nations England was moved in part by a sincere idealism but also by a false idea she had formed of a League of Nations that would overcome cannon with volleys of edifying discourse."

": To be strong. A nation that is not ready to die for its liberties will lose them. To act quickly. Ten thousand airplanes built in time are better than fifty thousand after the battle. To direct opinion. A leader shows the way; he does not follow. To preserve a united country. Political parties are passengers aboard the same ship; if they wreck it, all will perish. To protect public opinion against the influences of foreign governments. To defend ideas is legitimate; to accept money from abroad for defending them is a crime. To punish immediately and severely any illegal violence. Incitement to illegal violence is a crime. To protect youth against teaching calculated to weaken the unity of the country. A state that does not try to preserve itself commits suicide. To demand that those who govern lead upright lives. Vice of any kind gives a foothold to the enemy. To believe passionately in the ideas and in the way of life for which you are fighting. It is faith that creates armies and even arms. Liberty deserves to be served with more passion than tyranny."

"No country in the world has more reverence than France for a good literary education. Every middleclass Frenchman knows at least some of his classics by heart; he has been brought up on La Fontaine, and Corneille, and Molière. The Comédie-Française, which is the national theatre, and the French Academy, are public institutions, and a surprisingly great part of the nation takes an interest in their ceremonies. Very often in the course of the last fifty years, France was governed by professors. Whether it was a sound idea or not is another story, but it is a fact, and it shows the great importance attached by Frenchmen to classical eloquence, to the proper use of words, to simple and beautiful language."

"In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at the courts of the last Kings of France, idle men and women of infinite subtlety took pleasure in analysing very minutely each other's feelings and thoughts. The result was this wonderful literature that goes from La Bruyère and Pascal to Stendhal and Marcel Proust. France became a country of very refined taste. The part played by her in modern Europe was in a way similar to that played by Greece in the ancient world; she took pleasure in a delicious simplicity. Other literatures may have had more strength, more romantic violence; none had that mysterious perfection."

"The people themselves, men and women, are sometimes in France, works of art... [M]any Frenchmen, in the happy days of peace, had turned life into a fine art. What could be more delightful than to dine with a few well-chosen friends, in a small Paris restaurant? The owner, who was called the Patron, was, of course, at the same time, the chef. He wasn't so much interested in your money as in your appreciation of his great talents. He wasn't a tradesman, but an artist and a friend. And the guests were often worthy of the setting. Paris conversation at its best was witty, brilliant, sometimes deep, never ponderous, sparkling with anecdotes, portraits and sketches of the great."

"It's much better to run the risk of a few kisses before marriage, for they at least leave some memories." "...or some regrets."

"A little unsure of himself in her presence, he always addressed her in questions, a habit common to parents, sovereigns, generals, and teachers."

"It's better to arouse pity than envy."

"Genius consists of equal parts of natural aptitude and hard work."

"I have always maintained...that no one judges the mistakes of love — so long as they are accompanied by sincere repentance — that no one judges them with more understanding than a woman at once irreproachable and sensitive."

"Our poor bodies have strength and resources that we learn to know only when we are in the gravest situations."

"Sometimes with men, their pride can override their hearts."

"The best part of our misfortunes — our moral unhappiness, I mean — comes from the fact that we have words to describe them.... We give them body, we even go so far as to give them a body which is not their own, for the words of common language do not always correspond to our sufferings, which may be of a new and distinct sort.... And then, too, words prolong and preserve sorrows that should long have been forgotten. Animal nature forgets...."

"A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape."

"The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought."

"The great classic writers, it will be said, sought rather to proclaim universal truths than to leave their imprint on them."

"Style is the outcome of constraint."

"The aspiring author, whether genius or not, should never let a day pass without writing at least a few lines."

"Writing should never be allowed to become a substitute for living. Style cannot breath in a void. It should not be forgotten that Dickens was at one time a reporter, Balzac a lawyer's clerk and Tchekov a county doctor. Art is different from life but cannot exist without it."

"In the case of a novel, or any imaginative work, especially if the tone is poetic, my own preference is for ending with a touch of symbolism which shall leave the reader brooding. A fine novel, a well-written story, "proves" nothing. Certain characters have played their parts, life goes on, and the final passage may be allowed to remain with one foot in the air, as is the case with some of Chopin's conclusions. But there is no absolute rule in such matters, and there are epic novelists who like to end on a powerful crescendo, as Ravel does in Bolero, or Dvorak in the New-World Symphony. Composition has features which are common to all the arts, and the author can learn as much about his business in the concert hall as in the library."

"The cinema...may have a specific beauty of its own, but it does not permit that constant re-reading, that meditative brooding, those turning-back to passages heavily charged with meaning, which form the special pleasure of the novel-reader."

"Almost all the great novels have as their motif, more or less disguised, the "passage from childhood to maturity", the clash between the thrill of expectation, and the disillusioning knowledge of the truth."

"One can love a real woman after having loved her imagined counterpart. Similarly, one can adapt oneself to a society which, previously, one held in contempt."

"The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life. "The characters crowd onto the page", writes Mauriac, "there to accomplish all those things which the personal destiny of the author has kept at bay."

"The truth is that, from the immense spectacle of the world, each novelists retains the one adventure which enable shim to give expression to his own essential self, just as the painter sees in nature only pictures painted in his manner."

"Hence, Paul Morand's generalization to the effect that French writers are never younger, never more free from constraint, than when they have passed their sixtieth birthday. By that time they have broken free from the romantic agonies of youth and turned their backs on that pursuit of honors which, in a country where literature plays a social role, absorbs too much of their energies during the years of maturity."

"The old writer, like the old actor, is a master of his craft. Youthfulness of style is no more than a matter of technique."

"Of women he [Voltaire] has no very high opinion. To judge from his treatment of them, their minds are exclusively occupied by the prospect of making love to handsome young men with good figures, though, being both venal and timid, they are prepared to hire their bodies to old inquisitors or soldiers if, by so doing, they can save their own lives or amass riches. They are inconstant, and will gladly cut off the nose of a husband fondly mourned in order to cure a new lover."

"So, human beings complain that the world is ill-made, do they? But ill-made for whom? For Man, who, in the immense design of the Universe is no more than an unimportant mould! The probability is that everything in this world which we think is botched or erroneous has its reasons at a totally different level of existence. The mould endures, no doubt, a small amount of suffering, but somewhere there are giants who, huge in stature as in mind, live in a state of semi-divinity. This is Voltaire's answer to the problem of evil. It is not very satisfactory because the mould need never have been created, and, in the eyes of God, it may well be that mere size is of no importance."

"Only passions can raise a man above the level of the animal."

"I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt."

"I was exposed to Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo, de Maupassant, Balzac."