French Nature Quotes & Sayings

A Chipewyan guide named Saltatha once asked a French priest what lay beyond the present life. 'You have told me heaven is very beautiful,' he said. 'Now tell me one more thing. Is it more beautiful than the country of the muskoxen in the summer, when sometimes the mist blows over the lakes, and sometimes the water is blue, and the loons cry very often? That is beautiful. If heaven is still more beautiful, I will be glad. I will be content to rest there until I am very old. — Barry Lopez

The classic theology of my tradition comes from the French Renaissance. [William] Shakespeare was born in 1564, the year [John] Calvin died, and that theology was very influential in England in his lifetime. I think Shakespeare was attentive to questions raised by it, about human nature, history, reality itself. I find the two literatures to be mutually illuminating. — Marilynne Robinson

On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers. — Thomas Merton

There is only one universal language, which is the language of numbers and proportions that are so striking and stunningly built into the Great Pyramid and to which our current science has no appropriate response. We can no longer ignore that this ancient civilization was aware of our units used in modern mathematics and physics and were even aware of our metric system. Our metric system originating in the eighteenth century, designed and implemented by a committee of mathematicians and physicists commissioned by the French revolutionary government. — Willem Witteveen

Two of the human race's greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. — Tana French

The recent experience of totalitarianism in Europe was foreshadowed at the French Revolution, when the Committee of Public Safety acted in the same way as the Nazi and Communist parties, setting up 'parallel structures' through which to control the state and to exert a micromanagerial tyranny over every aspect of civil society.
Let us at least be realistic, and recognize that, if totalitarian governments have arisen and spread with such rapidity in modern times, this is because there is something in human nature to which they correspond and on which they draw for their moral energy. — Roger Scruton

Sleep is perverse as human nature, Sleep is perverse as legislature ... So people who go to bed to sleep Must count French premiers or sheep, And people who ought to arise from bed Yawn and go back to sleep instead. — Ogden Nash

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;- on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. — Matthew Arnold

There is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. It's a first approximation, but one that is real. In the former, the factors of integrity tend to dominate more over the factors of ideology. It's not that scientists are more honest people. It's just that nature is a harsh taskmaster. You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it'll be refuted tomorrow. — Noam Chomsky

I've noticed that a lot of people do much better when all their resolutions are framed as 'Yes.' Not something like, "I'm going to give up French Fries," but something like "I'm going to eat three vegetables every day." "I'm going to hug more, kiss more, touch more." "I'm going to listen to more music." They do better when they frame things in the positive. And I think this is just part of human nature. — Gretchen Rubin

If my fellow Americans could adopt even a fraction of the French attitude about food and life (don't worry, you don't have to sign on to the politics, too), managing weight would cease to be a terror, an obsession, and reveal its true nature as part of the art of living. — Mireille Guiliano

My parents were lenient. My mother believed God was another word for nature. I took up Satanism not out of desperation, but out of logic. I rebelled, not but because of a religious or repressive childhood. I wanted to join the French Foreign Legion. — Anton Szandor LaVey

The French by their nature had a permanent hunger for sensation. This was even more true of the eighteenth century, of which that considerable expert Victor du Bled remarked that no other age was ever so bored. — Antal Szerb

Knocknaree wood was the real thing, and it was more intricate and more secretive than I had remembered. It had its own order, its own fierce battles and alliances. I was an intruder here, now, and I had a deep prickling sense that my presence had instantly been marked and that the wood was watching me, with an equivocal collected gaze, not yet accepting or rejecting; reserving judgement. — Tana French

Whether we like it or not, if we are to pursue a career in science, eventually we have to learn the "language of nature": mathematics. Without mathematics, we can only be passive observers to the dance of nature rather than active participants. As Einstein once said, "Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas." Let me offer an analogy. One may love French civilization and literature, but to truly understand the French mind, one must learn the French language and how to conjugate French verbs. The same is true of science and mathematics. Galileo once wrote, "[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to understand a single word. — Michio Kaku

Despite all their flaws, zoos wake us up. They invite us to step outside our most basic assumptions. Offered for our contemplation, the animals remind us of nature's impossibly varied schemes for survival, all the strategies that species rely upon for courtship and mating and protecting the young and establishing dominance and hunting for something to eat and avoiding being eaten. On a good day, zoos shake people into recognizing the manifold possibilities of existence, what it's like to walk across the Earth, or swim in its oceans of fly above its forests - even though most animals on display will never have the chance to do any of those things again, at least not in the wild. — Thomas French

And I sometimes think that the fading out of the individual personality is what one should desire, not the status of a hero - a sort of effacement of oneself from history. The entire record of the human race has been falsified, it has been made up by bad governments to suit themselves, by kings and tyrants to make them look good. This idea of history as made by great men is quite nonsensical, when you look at it from the point of view of the people. The real heroes are those who have resisted tyrants, and it is in the nature of tyranny not only to kill those who oppose it but to wipe their names out of the record, to obliterate them, so that resistance seems impossible. — Hilary Mantel

The idea was flawed, of course," he said irritably. "Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race's greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living. — Tana French

Nature is what you see plus what you think about it. — John French Sloan

It is at a time like this, when crisis threatens the stomach, that the French display the most sympathetic side of their nature. Tell them stories of physical injury or financial ruin and they will either laugh or commiserate politely. But tell them you are facing gastronomic hardship, and they will move heaven and earth and even restaurant tables to help you. — Peter Mayle

For example, a few years ago, a great French philosopher, Roger Garaudy, wrote a scientific book. He did not offend, curse, or insult anyone. He wrote a scientific research of an academic nature, in which he discussed the alleged Jewish Holocaust in Germany. He proved that this Holocaust is a myth. — Hassan Nasrallah

The heart of a father is the masterpiece of nature. — Antoine Francois Prevost D'Exiles

Shortly before ten o'clock the stillness of the air grew quite oppressive, and the silence was so marked that the bleating of a sheep inland or the barking of a dog in the town was distinctly heard, and the band on the pier, with its lively French air, was like a dischord in the great harmony of nature's silence. A little after midnight came a strange sound from over the sea, and high overhead the air began to carry a strange, faint, hollow booming. — Bram Stoker

We know no fear. It was cut from our souls at birth. We can feel it only as an absence, as an empty shadow cast by the light of annihilation. In the face of a future of atrocity I stand mute, numb to the only feeling that would make me human. But I remember what fear was: its cold pulse in my veins; its echo in my ears. I remember fear, and remember that I was once human. I look towards what must come to pass and I wish that I could meet it as my ancestors did, with fear. The future deserves that, it deserves fear. — John French

The earliest movies that I loved were French movies and Italian movies. I grew up watching those kind of movies and often find the truest looks at human nature - you can find them in another country's movies. — Lucy Fisher

Economic theorists, like French chefs in regard to food, have developed stylized models whose ingredients are limited by some unwritten rules. Just as traditional French cooking does not use seaweed or raw fish, so neoclassical models do not make assumptions derived from psychology, anthropology, or sociology. I disagree with any rules that limit the nature of the ingredients in economic models. — George Akerlof

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model. — Marilyn French

Then humming thrice, he assumed a most ridiculous solemnity of aspect, and entered into a learned investigation of the nature of stink...The French were pleased with the putrid effluvia of animal food; and so were the Hottentots in Africa, and the Savages in Greenland; and that the Negroes on the coast of Senegal would not touch fish till it was rotten; strong presumptions in favour of what is generally called stink, as those nations are in a state of nature, undebauched by luxury, unseduced by whim and caprice: that he had reason to believe the stercoraceous flavour, condemned by prejudice as a stink, was, in fact, most agreeable to the organs of smelling; for, that every person who pretended to nauseate the smell of another's excretions, snuffed up his own with particular complacency... — Tobias Smollett

Such is the nature and make-up of the French that they are only good at the start. Then they are worse than devils, but, given time, they're less than women. — Francois Rabelais

They didn't know the first thing about Diem's tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalism, or the long colonialism of the French - this was all too damned complicated, it required some reading - but no matter, it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, which was how they liked things, and you were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing or dying for plain and simple reasons. I — Tim O'Brien

Some part of me believed, unassailably, and wordlessly and perhaps with a flick of justice, that they had sent me away because they were afraid of me. Like some monstrously deformed child who should never have lived beyond infancy, or a conjoined twin whose other half died under the knife, I had- simply by surviving-become a freak of nature. — Tana French

We get bored with everything, my angel, it's a law of nature: it's not my fault. — Laclos, Pierre Choderlos De

French is a foreign language, but I've been speaking it since I was 18 so it's second nature to me. — Kristin Scott Thomas

It would be hard to get statistics on violent death
what do you count as murder? When people starve to death because of policies of governments and corporations, is that murder? Nature does a fair amount of murdering itself, which is why this whole notion of dominating nature arose: it was one of those things that seemed a good idea at the time. No one ever believes a cure will prove worse than the disease. And maybe it isn't. An invasion of microbes that destroys a body could also be called murder. All deaths are violent deaths, I suppose. — Marilyn French

The Poodle
The poodle -- nature's most perfect food -- was invented by Otto Van Plotsberg in 1872. According to Van Plotsberg he had only just begun experimenting with kinky hair and extra toes when he happened upon the formula for poodles. Van Plotsberg's first poodles sported only one leg -- a stumpy appendage protruding from the center of the body. These crude early versions (commonly inverted and used as hat stands) were soon abandoned in favor of the superior French model, which featured a winning smile and four limbs positioned strategically around the torso. Thus began the dizzying proliferation of the modern-day poodle -- hampered temporarily by a 1909 decree which stated that "Henceforth all poodles shall bear the name Svee," marking a slight decline in the population until the edict was overturned. Today, poodles inhabit every corner of the earth. Witness the African Killer Poodle, The Wild Poodles of Borneo, and the elusive Giant Swamp Poodle of Denchai. — Elyse Friedman

Coup d'Oeil Concept A French expression which loosely translated means the "strike of the eye" or the "vision behind the eye." The closest English concept would be that of intuition. Intuition is defined as "perceptive insight" or "the power to discern the true nature of a situation. — Charles "Sid" Heal

You're watching us and you don't realize how much makeup and how much lighting is involved when we look good. We have a lot of help where we are. I don't think that it's healthy for young girls to be looking at these beauty magazines and watching TV and these shows and thinking [that's the standard] there's more European attitude - you look at French film, Spanish film, they're a little more open to quirks and human nature. That we're not all symmetrical, not all the same shape we need more of that. — Natalie Dormer

It's not uncommon for revolutions to stem from a radicalized group just outside the circle of power. That's what the French Revolution was all about; that's what the American Revolution was. The question is: Will all those groups, because of the nature of partisan polarization and ideological polarization, just fight each other? Or is there capacity to organize? — Chris Hayes

He is careful to deny responsibility for September, but he does not, you notice, condemn the killings. He also refrains from killing words, sparing Roland and Buzot, as if they were beneath his notice. August 10 was illegal, he says; so too was the taking of the Bastille. What account can we take of that, in revolution? It is the nature of revolutions to break laws. We are not justices of the peace; we are legislators to a new world. — Hilary Mantel

Kirk defined the ideologue as one who "thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature." Unleashed during the most radical phase of the French Revolution, the spirit of ideology has metastasized over the past two centuries, wreaking horrors. Jacobinism, Anarchism, Marxism, Leninism, Fascism, Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism - all shared the fatal attraction to "political messianism"; all were "inverted religions." Each of these ideologies preached a dogmatic approach to politics, economics, and culture. Each in its own way endeavored "to substitute secular goals and doctrines for religious goals and doctrines." Thus did the ideologue promise "salvation in this world, hotly declaring that there exists no other realm of being."17 — Russell Kirk