Untranslatable French Quotes & Sayings

In 1913, the noted German actor and director Paul Wegener was making a film in Prague when he heard the legend of Rabbi Loew, who created a golem to protect the inhabitants of the Prague ghetto from persecution. — Kage Baker

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people. — Danger Mouse

collectivity, on the other hand, is the place of what the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal calls "divertissement," an untranslatable word which roughly means "distraction" or "diversion": It is the escape from life's problems, and also its invitations, into activities that in ultimate terms are meaningless. It is a constant turning to superficial actions as a way to avoid facing the true realities of human life. The soap operas and situation comedies easily become an addiction. They take the place of the "bread and circuses" of ancient Rome. There was plenty wrong with Roman society and the Roman emperors offered the diversion of food and entertainment to make people forget the banality and meaninglessness of the lives they lived. Our society does much the same and has ever so much more in the way of sophisticated tools for doing so. — William H. Shannon

As much as I am a huge soccer fan, music just kills it when it comes to importance. I could go to a desert island without a football and survive happily, but if I had to go without music, I think I'd end up killing myself. It fuels my soul. It always has. — Joe Elliott

Yes, I introduced the congressional pay cut bill, cutting our salaries by five percent. And I think we have to lead by example. — Ann Kirkpatrick

I don't know why but I love this kind of project, when it's a little difficult and when you have a history. The beginning of the story of viticulture was in the Middle East, and it was a different generation than the science and logistics of today. My passion is to go into the past to make wine. Wine is something cultural, not only something to drink. I always try to find the identity of the place. — Stephane Derenoncourt

stomach. "I'll do what I can." "Good. Love — Clarissa Wild

I got very cross with the term, kitchen sink. It just meant that you invaded different kinds of houses, where it was very difficult to avoid kitchen sink. — Timothy West

Christ [is] the very essence of all delights and pleasures, the very soul and substance of them. As all the rivers are gathered into the ocean, which is congregation or meeting-place of all waters in the world: so Christ is that ocean in which all true delights and pleasures meet ... — John Flavel

The words that are coming out of my mouth and how I mean them, it's so much different. — Earl Sweatshirt

By all means listen to other people's advice, but when in doubt go with your gut instinct. — Steve Pavlina

It will be said that great societies cannot exist without government. — Thomas Jefferson

There are times I look around and it seems the world is so ugly, and I just can't seem to see the earth's natural beauty anymore, but when my eyes look up to the ethereal sky, I am reminded of the major contrast between Gods brilliant creations and human beings man-made imitations, and there is no comparison. — Delano Johnson

Since World War II, inflation - the apparently inexorable rise in the prices of goods and services - has been the bane of central bankers. — Ben Bernanke

Oh! It is dreadful...that one is almost always separated from those ones loves dearly and is encumbered with those one dislikes. -Queen Victoria — Cecil Woodham-Smith

However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins. It was words of this kind that, descending on me like a swarm of winged insects, seized on my individuality and sought to shut me up within it. Nevertheless, despite the enemy's depredations upon my person, I turned their universality - at once a weapon and a weakness - back on them, and to some extent succeeded in using words to universalize to my own individuality. — Yukio Mishima