#french

The only thing that lasts is love, even when it's gone. ↗

— Ellen Sussman

#love #love

But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#genius #intellect #proust #seed #social

History is a Rorschach test, people. What you see when you look at it tells you as much about yourself as it does about the past. ↗

— Jennifer Donnelly

#history #revolution

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius - or French. ↗

— Madeleine Albright

#french #genius #understand #you

We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life. ↗

— David Amram

#both #common #common interests #country #dreams

Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested. ↗

— Hervey Allen

#brilliant #civilization #departed #each #economic

That was after Napoleon died because there is still a controversy as to whether Napoleon was poisoned with arsenic. And the French say the British did it and the British say the French did it, but he died before the test for arsenic was available. ↗

— Michael Baden

#arsenic #available #because #before #british

As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible. ↗

— Mario Batali

#cooks #could #each #eating #edible

The songs of Bizet are by a French peer of Rossini. When Rossini stopped composing, he was living in Paris. He also wrote some beautiful songs in French. ↗

— Cecilia Bartoli

#beautiful #composing #french #living #paris

That result at the French was a big break for me. I had been playing quite well up until that point but nobody really expected me to do well on clay - it was my worst surface. I had had some success on the clay but I was a set and a break up in the semi-final against Jausovec and maybe the enormity of the occasion got to me. ↗

— Jo Durie

#been #big #big break #break #break up