Literary Critics

"Flâner est une science, c'est la gastronomie de l'œil.Se promener, c'est végéter ; flâner, c'est vivre... Flâner, c'est jouir, c'est recueillir des traits d'esprit, c'est admirer de sublimes tableaux de malheur, d'amour, de joie, des portraits gracieux ou grotesques ; c'est plonger ses regards au fond de mille existences : jeune, c'est tout désirer, tout posséder ; vieillard, c'est vivre de la vie des jeunes gens, c'est épouser leurs passions."

"Qui ne voudrait pas rester persuadé que ces femmes sont vertueuses ? Ne sont-elles pas la fleur du pays ? Ne sont-elles pas toutes verdissantes, ravissantes, étourdissantes de beauté, de jeunesse, de vie et d'amour ? Croire à leur vertu est une espèce de religion sociale ; car elles sont l'ornement du monde et font la gloire de la France."

"Il y a des femmes dont la grossesse fait sourire quelque célibataire sournois."

"Le mariage est un combat à outrage avant lequel les deux époux demandent au ciel sa bénédiction, parce que s'aimer toujours est la plus téméraire des entreprises ; le combat ne tarde pas à commencer, et la victoire, c'est-à-dire la liberté, demeure au plus adroit."

"Je voudrais, un jour, avoir un nom si connu, si populaire, si célèbre, si glorieux enfin, qu'il m'authorisât, à p[éter] dans le monde, et que le monde trouvât ça tout naturel."

"Tuer un parent de qui l’on se plaint, c’est quelque chose ; mais hériter de lui, c’est là un plaisir !"

"Malheureusement, ce portrait ne corrigera personne de la manie d’aimer de anges au doux sourire, à l’air rêveur, à figure candide, dont le cœur est un coffre-fort."

"Une jeune fille est comme une fleur qu'on a cueillie ; mais la femme coupable est une fleur sur laquelle on a marché."

"On amplifie également le malheur et le bonheur, nous ne sommes jamais ni si malheureux, ni si heureux qu'on le dit."

"Lorsque les femmes nous aiment, elles nous pardonnent tout, même nos crimes ; lorsqu'elles ne nous aiment pas, elles ne nous pardonnent rien, pas même nos vertus !"

"Les hivers sont pour les femmes à la mode ce que fut jadis une campagne pour les militaires de l’empire."

"Il y a deux musiques : une petite, mesquine, de second ordre, partout semblable à elle-même, qui repose sur une centaine de phrases que chaque musicien s'approprie, et qui constitue un bavardage plus ou moins agréable avec lequel vivent la plupart des compositeurs."

"Le courant des affaires devant toujours s'expédier, il surnage une certaine quantité de commis qui se sait indispensable quoique congéable à merci et qui veut rester en place. La bureaucratie, pouvoir gigantesque mis en mouvement par des nains, est née ainsi. Si en subordonnant toute chose et tout homme à sa volonté, Napoléon avait retardé pour un moment l'influence de la bureaucratie, ce rideau pesant placé entre le bien à faire et celui qui peut l'ordonner, elle s'était définitivement organisée sous le gouvernement constitutionnel, nécessairement ami des médiocrités, grand amateur de pièces probantes et de comptes, enfin tracassier comme une petite bourgeoise."

"Tone is light in another shape. In music, instruments perform the functions of the colours employed in painting."

"Vous savez quelles sont mes religions.Je ne suis point orthodoxe et ne crois pas à l'Église romaine. Je trouve que s'il ya quelque plan digne du sien, ce sont les transformations humaines faisant marcher l'être vers des zones inconnues.C'est la loi des créations qui nous sont inférieures : ce doit être la loi des créations supérieures.Le swedenborgisme, qui n'est qu'une répétition, dans le sens chrétien, d'anciennes idées, est ma religion, avec l'augmentation que j'y fais de l'incompréhensibilité de Dieu."

"Les hommes sont ainsi faits, ils résistent à une discussion sérieuse et tombent sous un regard."

"L'égalité sera peut-être un droit, mais aucune puissance humaine ne saura le convertir en fait."

"La gloire est le soleil des morts."

"Tout pouvoir humain est un composé de patience et de temps."

"Je suis un galérien de plume et d'encre."

"Qui dépense trop n’est jamais riche."

"To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water."

"Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need."

""Memory is a field full of psychological ruins," wrote French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. For some that may be true, but memory is also a field of healing that has the capacity to restore the world, not only for the one person who recollects, but for cultures as well. When a person says "I remember," all things are possible."

"Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event."

"Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make."

"One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort."

"Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books."

"A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language."

"Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectifications of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid."

"To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry."

"There is no original truth, only original error."

"To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer."

"The words of the world want to make sentences."

"Man is an imagining being."

"The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows."

"Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul."

"The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth."

"Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world."

"I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company."

"A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream."

"Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls."

"Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language."

"The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in."

"Words … are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in ‘foreign commerce’ on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves—this is a poet’s life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together."

"If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace."

"The reflected world is the conquest of calm"

"True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams."

"A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition."

"On the face of it, this claim [i.e., Derrida's thesis that speech is privileged over writing] is bizarre. The distinction between speech and writing is simply not very important to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, etc. And of these listed, the only one about whom Derrida offers any evidence for the privileging of the spoken is Plato, who, in Phaedrus, made a few remarks about the impossibility of subjecting written texts to interrogation. Plato points out, correctly, that you can ask questions of a speaking person in a way that you cannot of a written text. On Derrida's account, however, it is essential not only to Husserl, but to philosophy, and indeed to "the history of the world during an entire epoch," including the present, that speech should be mistakenly privileged over writing. If Derrida's claim were to be taken at its face value, I believe that a contrary argument could be given equal or even greater plausibility. From the medieval development of Aristotle's logic through Leibniz's Characteristica Universalis through Frege and Russell and up to the present development of symbolic logic, it could be argued that exactly the reverse is the case; that by emphasizing logic and rationality, philosophers have tended to emphasize written language as the more perspicuous vehicle of logical relations. Indeed, as far as the present era in philosophy is concerned, it wasn't until the 1950s that serious claims were made on behalf of the ordinary spoken vernacular languages, against the written ideal symbolic languages of mathematical logic. When Derrida makes sweeping claims about "the history of the world during an entire epoch," the effect is not so much apocalyptic as simply misinformed."