Rene Quotes & Sayings

You only fight well for causes you yourself have shaped, with which you identify - and burn. — Rene Char

It is to the body alone that we should attribute everything that can be observed in us to oppose our reason. — Rene Descartes

How did writing come to me? Like bird's down on my windowpane, in winter. Just then there rose in the heart a struggle of firebrands, which has, still now, not ended. — Rene Char

Mutual content is like a river, which must have its banks on either side. — Alain-Rene Lesage

Yes, I pray and go to church and read my Bible. But sometimes I shake my fist at God. It's not the picture of peace I realize, and I certainly make no claims of wearing the armor of God. I'm lucky if I can get the underwear of decency on, all right? — Rene Gutteridge

If you see how a plant grows and you taste it in situ you have a perfect example of how it should taste on the plate. — Rene Redzepi

And my father, being a good Swiss puritan, always really insisted that if I was going to be an actor, I shouldn't just be an actor, I should know about the whole process. — Rene Auberjonois

Man is head, chest and stomach. Each of these animals operates, more often than not, individually. I eat, I feel, I even, although rarely, think. This jungle crawls and teems, is hungry, roars, gets angry, devours itself, and its cacophonic concert does not even stop when you are asleep. — Rene Daumal

Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible. — Rene Magritte

My photography is the result of being there at the right moment. — Rene Burri

Europeans, since the days when they began to believe in :progress" and in "evolution," that is to say since a little more than a century ago, profess to see a sign of inferiority in this absence of change, whereas for our part, we look upon it as a balanced condition which Western civilization has failed to achieve. — Rene Guenon

But an absolute value is not proven by logic or metaphysical arguments; it is accepted, believed (even when not discussed), and hedged about with taboos to protect it. — Rene Girard

Achilles exists only through Homer . Take away the art of writing from this world , and you will probably take away its glory . — Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand

Saiman picked up a coffee mug, stared at it, and hurled it against the wall. It shattered into a dozen pieces. We looked at him.
"Your date appears to be hysterical," Rene told me.
"You think I should slap some man into him? — Ilona Andrews

The essence of desire is to have no essential goal. Truly to desire, we must have recourse to people about us; we have to desire their desires. — Rene Girard

For these reasons, as soon as my age permitted me to pass from under the control of my instructors, I entirely abandoned the study of letters, and resolved no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world. I spent the remainder of my youth in traveling, in visiting courts and armies, in holding intercourse with men of different dispositions and ranks, in collecting varied experience, in proving myself in the different situations into which fortune threw me, — Rene Descartes

It is the Other whom one must love as oneself if one does not desire to idolize and hate the Other in the depths of the underground. — Rene Girard

Cooperation over competition. If the world simply sees this statement, together we can begin our exploration of it. Simply seeing it is enough to create change. — Rene Gaudette

I have concluded the evident existence of God, and that my existence depends entirely on God in all the moments of my life, that I do not think that the human spirit may know anything with greater evidence and certitude. — Rene Descartes

Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare. — Rene Descartes

The mechanisms of vis medicatrix naturae - the most healing power of nature - are so effective that most diseases are self-terminating. — Rene Dubos

How to live spiritually:
- Love and appreciate yourself
- Be honest with yourself
- Express yourself truthfully
- Know you are abundance
- Remember to use humor
- Don't forget to choose — Rene Gaudette

It's a pity to shoot the pianist when the piano is out of tune. — Rene Coty

Gratitude is a species of love, excited in us by some action of the person for whom we have it, and by which we believe that he has done some good to us, or at least that he has had the intention of doing so.

Passions, III, 193. XI, 473-474. Trans. John Morris — Rene Descartes

All of the people who work in the kitchen with me go out into the forests and on to the beach. It's a part of their job. If you work with me you will often be starting your day in the forest or on the shore because I believe foraging will shape you as a chef. — Rene Redzepi

Just as we believe by faith that the greatest happiness of the next life consists simply in the contemplation of this divine majesty, likewise we experience that we derive the greatest joy of which we are capable in this life from the same contemplation, even though it is much less perfect. — Rene Descartes

I think one can achieve a very pleasant lifestyle by treating human beings, fellow human beings, very well. — Rene Rivkin

Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries. — Rene Descartes

I had to fend for myself from the time I was 17 years old. I was a high-school dropout. I wasn't quite living on the streets, but I didn't have a lot of hope. — Rene Russo

Strong and in control - I don't necessarily feel that way. I'm a little bit more scattered in my life. I'm more of a street girl, in a way. — Rene Russo

The Covenant of the League of Nations had envisaged sponsoring only the protection of certain categories of men: national minorities and populations of territories controlled by other countries. — Rene Cassin

All models divide naturally ... into two a priori parts: one is kinematics, whose aim is to parameterize the forms of the states of the process under consideration, and the other is dynamics, describing the evolution in time of these forms. — Rene Thom

Topology is precisely the mathematical discipline that allows the passage from local to global ... — Rene Thom

Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back. — Rene Dubos

When buying shares, ask yourself, would you buy the whole company? — Rene Rivkin

It's not the end of it when you've drowned your black thoughts, because afterwards there are blue thoughts and red thoughts and yellow thoughts ... — Rene Daumal

The human individual is, at one and the same time, much more and much less than is ordinarily supposed in the West; he is greater by reason of his possibilities of indefinite extension beyond the corporeal modality, in short, of all that refers to what we have been studying; but he is also much less since, far from constituting a complete and sufficient being in himself, he is only an exterior manifestation, a fleeting appearance clothing the true being, which in no way affects the essence of the latter in its immutability — Rene Guenon

I will even be able to free it from the power of gravity which attracts it to the future and to make it go back into the past. — Rene Barjavel

More can be learned from what works than from what fails. — Rene Dubos

In June 1972, I went with friends to see the Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Forum. After the concert, as we crossed through the parking lot, a guy in a brown Mercedes stopped in the middle of the street and got out. He came up to me and asked if I had ever modeled. — Rene Russo

Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency. — Rene Descartes

Hesitating, at the threshold of various illusory paths of life, I considered them one by one, without daring to pursue any one of them. — Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand

I despise my own past and that of others. I despise resignation, patience, professional heroism and all the obligatory sentiments. I also despise the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, radio announcers' voices, aerodynamics, the Boy Scouts, the smell of naphtha, the news, and drunks.
I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street.
I hope for vibrant love, the impossible, the chimerical.
I dread knowing precisely my own limitations. — Rene Magritte

The hatred of the West and of everything that it represents arises not because its spirit is really foreign to the peoples of the third world, nor because they are really opposed to the "progress" that we embody, but because the competitive spirit is as familiar to them as it is to ourselves. Far from turning away from the West, they cannot prevent themselves from imitating it, from adopting its values without admitting it to themselves. They are no less consumed than we are by the ideology of individual and collective success. — Rene Girard

For 'tis not enough to have good faculties, but the principal is, to apply them well. — Rene Descartes

Regarding speculative matters that are of no practical moment, and followed by no consequences to himself, farther, perhaps, than that they foster his vanity the better the more remote they are from common sense; requiring, as they must in this case, the exercise of greater ingenuity and art to render them probable. — Rene Descartes

As soon as a true thought has entered our mind, it gives a light which makes us see a crowd of other objects which we have never perceived before. — Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand

The odor of literature as a stopgap, of words piled one upon the other to avoid taking action or to console oneself for being incapable of it. — Rene Daumal

According to your medical checkup, you are dead. — Rene Desmaison

Develop your legitimate strangeness. — Rene Char

Humankind is that creature who lost a part of its animal instinct in order to gain access to "desire," as it is called. Once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire intensely, but they don't know exactly what they desire, for no instinct guides them. We do not each have our own desire, one really our own. The essence of desire is to have no essential goal. Truly to desire, we must have recourse to people about us; we have to borrow their desires. — Rene Girard

Those who protest against "Western ethnocentrism" imagine themselves to owe nothing to the West, since after all they rage furiously against it. But in fact theirs is the most Western perspective of all, more Western than that of their adversaries.

Not only is the revolt against ethnocentrism an invention of the West, it cannot be found outside the West. — Rene Girard

It is a common failing of mortals to deem the more difficult the fairer. — Rene Descartes

I really do the conventions now for two reasons. — Rene Auberjonois

The dreams we imagine when we are asleep should not in any way make us doubt the truth of the thoughts we have when we are awake. — Rene Descartes

Those people who formerly had been half wilde, and civiliz'd but by degrees, made their laws but according to the incommodities which their crimes and their quarrels constrain'd them to, could not be so wel pollic'd, as those who from the beginning of their association, observ'd the constitutions of some prudent Legislator. — Rene Descartes

Life is short, the art is long, the problems pressing. — Rene Dubos

One of these days, I'm going to publish a book of all the pictures I did not take. It is going to be a huge hit. — Rene Burri

In less than eighteen months, it prepared a first draft which it submitted to the General Assembly and which, at the end of one hundred sessions of elevated, often impassioned discussion, was adopted in the form of thirty articles on December 10, 1948. — Rene Cassin

All the means we've been given to stay alert we use to ornament our sleep. If instead of endlessly inventing new ways to make life more comfortable we'd apply our ingenuity to fabricating instruments to jog man out of his torpor! — Rene Daumal

Why does Jesus regard the Father and himself as the best model for all humans? Because neither the Father nor the Son desires greedily, egotistically. God "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and he sends his rain on the just and on the unjust." God gives to us without counting, without marking the least difference between us. He lets the weeds grow with the wheat until the time of harvest. If we imitate the detached generosity of God, then the trap of mimetic rivalries will never close over us. This is why Jesus says also, "Ask, and it will be given to you ... " When Jesus declares that he does not abolish the Law but fulfills it, he articulates a logical consequence of his teaching. The goal of the Law is peace among humankind. Jesus never scorns the Law, even when it takes the form of prohibitions. Unlike modern thinkers, he knows quite well that to avoid conflicts, it is necessary to begin with prohibitions. — Rene Girard

Fashion is as profound and critical a part of the social life of man as sex, and is made up of the same ambivalent mixture of irresistible urges and inevitable taboos. — Rene Konig

In the matter of a difficult question it is more likely that the truth should have been discovered by the few than by the many. — Rene Descartes

I am indeed amazed when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error. — Rene Descartes

It is not the victory that makes the joy of noble hearts; but the combat. — Charles Forbes Rene De Montalembert

Maybe it's that I'm naive, but I don't think of myself as an age. — Rene Russo

Fifteen years ago, France was the promised land of cooking. So I looked at a map, found five restaurants and faxed them to ask for a job. Within five minutes, I got a reply from the then three- star Le Jardin des Sens in Montpellier. — Rene Redzepi

The New Nordic diet originated in 2004, when the visionary chefs Rene Redzepi and Claus Meyer called a symposium of regional chefs to address the public's increasing consumption of processed foods, additives, highly refined grains, and mass-produced poultry and meat. — Kate Christensen

Rene Char wrote somewhere, apropos poetry, that there are those who create and those who discover; they are too completely different worlds. Photograph also has two sides to it and thank goodness, I am only intersted in those who discover; I feel a certain solidarity with those who set out in a spirit of discovery; I think there is much more risk invovled in this than in trying to create images; and in the end, reality is more important. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street. — Rene Magritte

My investigations resembled the pursuit of the solution to a problem for which I had three data: the object, the thing connected with it in the shadow of my consciousness, and the light wherein that thing would become apparent. — Rene Magritte

Certainly no one can deny that we have such an idea of God in ourselves unless they think that there is no knowledge at all of God in human minds. — Rene Descartes

Conquer yourself rather than the world. — Rene Descartes

We have in fact entered upon the final phase ... , the darkest period of this dark age, the state of dissolution from which there is to be no emerging except through a cataclysm, since it is no longer a mere revival which is required, but a complete renovation. — Rene Guenon

Those in whom the faculty of reason is predominant, and who most skillfully dispose their thoughts with a view to render them clear and intelligible, are always the best able to persuade others of the truth of what they lay down, though they should speak only in the language of Lower Brittany, and be wholly ignorant of the rules of rhetoric; and those whose minds are stored with the most agreeable fancies, and who can give expression to them with the greatest embellishment and harmony, are still the best poets, though unacquainted with the art of poetry. — Rene Descartes

In the darkness of our lives, there is not one place for Beauty. The whole place is for Beauty. — Rene Char

Being married, I would say most relationships are pretty codependent in some ways. — Rene Russo

Nobody has a perfect life. What you see on the screen is the best of the artist. — Rene Angelil

As far as life is concerned, there is no such thing as "Nature". There are only homes. Home is that environment to which the individual has become adapted; and almost everything is unnatural outside his range of adaptation. Harmonious equilibrium with nature is an abstract concept with a Platonic beauty but lacking the flesh and blood of life. It fails, in particular, to convey the creative emergent quality of human existence. — Rene Dubos

I still cook at home. A lot of chefs I think don't cook at home. But I still do, I love cooking at home, I love having friends. — Rene Redzepi

People will travel anywhere for good food - it's crazy. — Rene Redzepi

A gastronomical supermeal didn't necessarily have to involve the things I had brought from other top kitchens. — Rene Redzepi

Wherever human beings are concerned, trend is not destiny. — Rene Dubos

We call infinite that thing whose limits we have not perceived, and so by that word we do not signify what we understand about a thing, but rather what we do not understand. — Rene Descartes

What lies inside a cage of flames? The truth, the heart, but burned up before you can see it. Only traces remain in the ashes, a pattern you guess at or invent, an intangible thing that might leave a mark, but could just as easily blow away. — Rene Steinke

But this could not be the case with-the idea of a nature more perfect than myself; for to receive it from nothing was a thing manifestly impossible; and, because it is not less repugnant that the more perfect should be an effect of, and dependence on the less perfect, than that something should proceed from nothing, it was equally impossible that I could hold it from myself: — Rene Descartes

You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing. — Rene Descartes

The cat lives alone, has no need of society, obeys only when she pleases, pretends to sleep that she may see more clearly, and scratches everything on which she can lay her paw. — Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream. — Rene Magritte

Several years have now passed since I first realized how numerous were the false opinions that in my youth I had taken to be true, and thus how doubtful were all those that I had subsequently built upon them. — Rene Descartes

The implementation measures of both Covenants, but especially those of the Covenant concerning civil and political rights, were considerably weakened to the point where they assumed an optional character. — Rene Cassin

Besides, often at difficult moments you'll catch yourself talking to the mountain, flattering it, cursing it, making promises or threats. And you will have the impression that the mountain answers you if you speak to it properly - by becoming gentler, more submissive. Don't think the less of yourself for that; don't be ashamed of behaving like those our specialists call primitives and animists. Just keep in mind, when you remember these moments later on, that your dialogue with nature was just the outward image of an inner dialogue with yourself. — Rene Daumal

Unfortunately, I think depression and anxiety are really hard to live with. And what people don't need is to feel bad about themselves because they decide to go on medication. — Rene Russo

But as soon as I had finished my course of study, at which time it is usual to be admitted to the ranks of the well educated, I completely changed my opinion, for I found myself bogged down in so many doubts and errors, that it seemed to me that having set out to become learned, I had derived no benefit from my studies, other than that of progressively revealing to myself how ignorant I was. — Rene Descartes

War is a total social phenomenon. In this respect, Clausewitz's analysis is a precursor of Durkheim's sociology. Clausewitz has things to teach us about "mass" violence and contagion. — Rene Girard

I never cooked at home - my father was the chef. — Rene Redzepi

The last rule was to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so comprehensive, that I should be certain of omitting nothing. — Rene Descartes

We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world. — Rene Magritte

How can we live without the unknown before us? — Rene Char

So that there resulted a chaos as disordered as the poets ever feigned, — Rene Descartes