Jacques Coeur Quotes

Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures - there's something sexual in it - that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can't write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann.


My great adventure is really Proust. Well - what remains to be written after that? I'm only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped - and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical - like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined.


Jacques Raverat...sent me a letter about Mrs Dalloway which gave me one of the happiest moments days of my life. I wonder if this time I have achieved something? Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom. And he will I suppose ~ Virginia Woolf

I just come and talk to the plants, really
very important to talk to them, they respond I find. ~ Jacques Charles

Without doubt, Malaysia is the great economic star of the Muslim world. ~ Martin Jacques

When my reason is afloat, my faith cannot long remain in suspense, and I believe in God as firmly as in any other truth whatever; in short, a thousand motives draw me to the consolatory side, and add the weight of hope to the equilibrium of reason. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Internet has been seen in the West as the quintessential expression of the free exchange of ideas and information, untrammeled by government interference and increasingly global in reach. But the Chinese government has shown that the Internet can be successfully filtered and controlled. ~ Martin Jacques

It is a noteworthy feature of 20C culture that for the first time in over a thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual. ~ Jacques Barzun

If you have extraordinary bread and extraordinary butter, it's hard to beat bread and butter. ~ Jacques Pepin

I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles. ~ Jacques Derrida

It is necessary that the object that the artist is shaping, whether it be a vase of clay or a fishing boat, be significant of something other than itself. This object must be a sign as well as an object; a meaning must animate it, and make it say more than it is. ~ Jacques Maritain

From my heel to my toe is a measured space of 29.7 centimetres or 11.7 inches. This is a unit of progress and it is also a unit of thought. 'I can only meditate when I am walking,' wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the fourth book of his 'Confessions', 'when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.' Søren Kierkegaard speculated that the mind might function optimally at the pedestrian pace of three miles per hour, and in a journal entry describes going out for a wander and finding himself 'so overwhelmed with ideas' that he 'could scarcely walk'. Christopher Morley wrote of Wordsworth as 'employ[ing] his legs as an instrument of philosophy' and Wordsworth of his own 'feeling intellect'. Nietzsche was typically absolute on the subject - 'Only those thoughts which come from 'walking' have a value' - and Wallace Stevens typically tentative: 'Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around the lake.' In all of these accounts, walking is not the action by which one arrives at knowledge; it is itself the means of knowing. ~ Robert Macfarlane

Well-meant ignorance is a grievous calamity in high places. ~ Jacques-Benigne Bossuet

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It is inconceivable that the God who gives Himself in His Son to save us, should have created some people ordained to evil and damnation. There can only be one predestination to salvation. In and through Jesus Christ all people are predestined to be saved. Our free choice is ruled out in this regard. God wants free people, except in relation to this last and definitive decision. We are not free to decide and choose to be damned. ~ Jacques Ellul

China is, indeed, in so many ways, not like the West. It is not even primarily a nation state but a civilisation state. Whereas the West has primarily been shaped by its experience of nation, China has been moulded by its sense of civilisation. ~ Martin Jacques

It's who I am. I can't just pretend to be some normal kid. That won't work either. They'll never leave me alone. But here's what I know: a block is a strike, and the more an adversary thinks he has succeeded, the more devastating the strike will be. ~ Jacques Antoine

To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; be is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness -- of himself, of his condition, of his society -- for the man who lives by current events. Such a man never stops to investigate any one point, any more than he will tie together a series of news events. We already have mentioned man's inability to consider several facts or events simultaneously and to make a synthesis of them in order to face or to oppose them. One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but be does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man's capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandist, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks. Moreover, there is a spontaneous defensive reaction in the individual against an excess of information and -- to the extent that he clings (unconsciously) to the unity of his own person -- against inconsistencie ~ Jacques Ellul

Tremble, ye tyrants, for ye can not die. ~ Jacques Delille

That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger - and philosophy should still wander toward the meaning of its death - or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying ... that philosophy died one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony, on the violent way it opens history by opposing itself to nonphilosophy, which is its past and its concern, its death and wellspring; that beyond the death, or dying nature, of philosophy, perhaps even because of it, thought still has a future, or even, as is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in store; or, more strangely still, that the future itself has a future - all these are unanswerable questions. By right of birth, and for one time at least, these are problems put to philosophy as problems philosophy cannot resolve. ~ Jacques Derrida

Men will argue more philosophically about the human heart; but women will read the heart of man better than they. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The child raised for his station, never leaving it, could not be exposed to the disadvantages of another. But given the mobility of human things, given the unsettled and restless spirit of this age which upsets everything in each generation, can one conceive of a method more senseless than raising a child as though he never had to leave his room, as though he were going to be constantly surrounded by his servants? If the unfortunate makes a single step on the earth, if he goes down a single degree, he is lost. This is not teaching him to bear suffering; it is training him to feel it. One thinks only of preserving one's child. That is not enough. One ought to teach him to preserve himself as a man. to bear the blows of fate, to brave opulence and poverty, to live, if he has to. in freezing Iceland or on Malta's burning rocks. You may very well take precautions against his dying. He will nevertheless have to die. And though his death were not the product of your efforts, still these efforts would be ill conceived. It is less a question of keeping him from dying than of making him live. To live is not to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve. ~ Jacques Barzun

Unlike motor sport, I didn't get into music for the live performances. I like writing and studio work and seeing how a song can come to life. ~ Jacques Villeneuve

My values are not based on violence. My values are based on courage, which you see time and time again in my books. A warrior isn't somebody like Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger. A warrior can be any age. A warrior is a person people look up to. ~ Brian Jacques

[ ... ] the state is not immoral but amoral; half of it exists outside morality ~ Jacques Barzun

We must go and see for ourselves. ~ Jacques-Yves Cousteau

If you look at American studios, the big productions have nothing to do with reality. ~ Jacques Audiard

All is more or less proper to serve as a common measure, in proportion as it is more or less in general use, of a more similar quality, and more easy to be divided into aliquot parts. All is more or less applicable for the purpose of a general pledge of exchange, in proportion as it is less susceptible of decay or alteration in quantity or quality. ~ Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron De Laune

Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking? ~ Terry Eagleton

It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable. ~ Jacques-Yves Cousteau

A 2013 study by Riley Dunlap and political scientist Peter Jacques found that a striking 72 percent of climate denial books, mostly published since the 1990s, were linked to right-wing think tanks, a figure that rises to 87 percent if self-published books (increasingly common) are excluded.23 ~ Naomi Klein

Universal silence must be taken to imply the consent of the people. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It was Jacques Chirac and Schroeder both, who pushed us into a conflict to remove Milosevic. ~ Curt Weldon

I describe a world with no exit, convinced that God accompanies man throughout his history . ~ Jacques Ellul

Thinking has become a superfluous exercise ... purely internal, without compelling force, more or less a game. ~ Jacques Ellul

The biblical teaching is clear. It always contests political power . It incites to "counterpower," to "positive" criticism , to an irreducible dialogue (like that between king and prophet in Israel ), to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the relation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or dominion (in other words, of all things political), and finally, if we may use a modern term, to a kind of " anarchism " (so long as we do not relate the term to the anarchist teaching of the nineteenth century). ~ Jacques Ellul

One phenomenon is certain and I can vouch for its absolute certainty: the sudden and immediate appearance of a solution at the very moment of sudden awakening. On being very abruptly awakened by an external noise, a solution long searched for appeared to me at once without the slightest instant of reflection on my part-the fact was remarkable enough to have struck me unforgettably-and in a quite different direction from any of those which I had previously tried to follow. ~ Jacques Hadamard

I don't remember everything that was happening around me at the time, but gangster life was intoxicating and irresistible. It's difficult to describe the feeling. It's that jungle culture, the lion syndrome, the Tarzan tag; the invincibility, the lure of living on the edge; having not just one woman but a whole brothel on your tail; the shooting irons, the fast cars and the endless supply of cocaine. ~ Jacques Pauw

Our world today is in need of peace, tolerance and brotherhood. The values of the Olympic Games can deliver these to us. May the Games be held in peace, in the true spirit of the Olympic Truce. Athletes of the 80 national Olympic committees, show us that sport unites by overcoming national, political, religious and language barriers. You can show us a world we all long for. ~ Jacques Rogge

The rest of the gang aren't worth mentioning. But every one of them's got a story.

I catch myself writing 'not worth mentioning'. According to what criteria? No reason whatever to feel superior. ~ Jacques Yonnet

Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so damn serious. ~ Jacques Maritain

After 45 years of marriage, when I have an argument with my wife, if we don't agree, we do what she wants. But, when we agree, we do what I want! ~ Jacques Pepin

Human life as a whole is not inundated by technique. It has room for activities that are not rationally or systematically ordered. But the collision between spontaneous activities and technique is catastrophic for the spontaneous activities. ~ Jacques Ellul

Hence, you are infinitely more than you imagine, subjects [or underlings] of gadgets and instruments of all kinds - ranging from the microscope, to radio and television - that will become elements of your being. ~ Lacan Jacques M.