Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

When I want to know what France thinks, I ask myself.

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French.

As an adolescent ... I was convinced that France would have to go through gigantic trials, that the interest of life consisted in one day rendering her some signal service and that I would have the occasion to do so.

Does this boat go to Europe, France?

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

Anatomy (n): something everyone has, but which looks better on a girl.

France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

San Francisco, n.: Marcel Proust editing an issue of Penthouse.

It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.

Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.

A woman must decide between a man who women like, and then have no security, or a man who women don’t like, and have no happiness.

No man should marry before he has studied anatomy and dissected the body of a woman.

Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with force and convulsive energy, full of expression, passion, and strength.

Only men who are not interested in women are interested in women's clothes. Men who like women never notice what they wear.

If my theory of relativity proves to be correct, Germany will claim me a German, and France will claim me a citizen of the world. However, if it proves wrong, France will say I

I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.

In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.

Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

A limerick packs laughs anatomical Into space that is quite economical. But the good ones I've seen So seldom are clean, And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

Like dear St. Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success.

The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse -- as a luxury befitting a young man.

I have a switch in my apartment that doesn't do anything. Every once in a while I turn it on and off. On and off. On and off. One day I got a call from a woman in France who said "Cut it out!

Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter -- it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

I was astonished at the effect my successful landing in France had on the nations of the world. To me, it was like a match lighting a bonfire.

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world.

Let France have good mothers, and she will have good sons.

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

If it were not for the government, we should have nothing to laugh at in France.

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

Being blunt with your feelings is very American. In this big country, I can be as brash as New York, as hedonistic as Los Angeles, as sensuous as San Francisco, as brainy as Boston, as proper as Philadelphia, as brawny as Chicago, as warm as Palm Springs, as friendly as my adopted home town of Dallas, Fort Worth, and as peaceful as the inland waterway that rubs up against my former home in Virginia Beach.

A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

We reproach people for talking about themselves; but it is the subject they treat best.

Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philter, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.

There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant.

France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, and. prove it abundantly.

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will. Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.

Chance is the pseudonym God uses when He does not want to sign His name.

The pseudonym for God when He did not want to sign.

God knows best; he hasn't arranged your anatomy so as to make it easy for you to pat yourself on the back.

Anatomy is destiny.