Julien Sorel Quotes

Dostoevsky was writing about losers. The main character of The Iliad, Hector, is a loser. It's very boring to talk about winners. The real literature always talks about losers. Madame Bovary is a loser. Julien Sorel is a loser. I am doing only the same job. Losers are more fascinating. Winners are stupid … because usually they win by chance ~ Umberto Eco

Oh, if there were only a true religion. Fool that I am, I see a Gothic cathedral and venerable stained-glass windows, and my weak heart conjures up the priest to fit the scene. My soul would understand him, my soul has need of him. I only find a nincompoop with dirty hair. ~ Stendhal

Perhaps it's best to think of our friends as we remember them in our hearts, not as they are now. ~ Zane Julien

Then of course there are the people who don't see their deaths coming. ~ M.B. Julien

Chekyns upon soppes" (basically chicken on cinnamon toast) from the 1545 early Tudor cookbook A Propre Newe Booke of Cokerye: Chekyns upon soppes. Take sorel sauce a good quantitie and put in Sinamon and suger and lette it boyle and poure it upon the soppes then laie on the chekyns. ~ Dan Jurafsky

No one has a problem with the first mile of a journey. Even an infant could do fine for a while. But it isn't the start that matters. It's the finish line. ~ Julien Smith

The man I am will always raise a protest against the man I wanted to be and the two will live together to the end, but the man I wanted to be will be the one on whom judgement will be passed. ~ Julien Green

Behind every flinch is a fear or an anxiety - sometimes rational, sometimes not. Without the fear, there is no flinch. But wiping out the fear isn't what's important - facing it is. ~ Julien Smith

Here be dragons. ~ Julien Smith

Whiteness is filthy. ~ Julien Torma

No, what numbed these fields, peopled with bad dreams was not the oppressive grip of a plague but rather an ailing retreat, a sort of sad widowhood. Man had started to subdue these vacant expanses, then had grown weary of eating into it, and now even the desire to preserve what had been claimed had perished. He had established everywhere an ebb, a sorrowful withdrawal. His cuttings into the forest, which were seen at long intervals, had lost their hard edges, their distinct notches: now a thick brushwood had driven its sabbath into the broad daylight of the glades, hiding the naked trunks as high as their lowest branches. ~ Julien Gracq

I don't know whether there are numbers. And you? ~ Julien Torma

Frederick the Great was accustomed to say: "The older one gets the more convinced one becomes that his Majesty King Chance does three-quarters of the business of this miserable universe." Sorel ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

I am the road running through Paris," says the Seine. 'I have carried off many images since you were a child and reflected many clouds. I am changeable, but as people are: I have my moments of happiness in the June dawn and my sinister times some December evenings. Above all I am inquisitive - you call it being in flood. We have something in common, you everlasting passers-by and I, the fleeing water, which is that we never go back: your time is my space. ~ Julien Green

Sometimes we do things, without thinking, that make no sense to us until much later, and yet appear to have been prompted by the most alert part of our being. ~ Julien Green

I run back to the peephole and see all three of them as they walk past with these things in their hands, I can hear the woman who I assume is their mother telling them a joke. I know the joke, but when I first heard it a long time ago, it didn't make me laugh. When she's done, I can hear the kids laughing. The joke still doesn't make me laugh, what makes me laugh are the laughing kids. That high pitched fast paced laugh that kids have. It's not until we get older that this laugh becomes low and drawn out. Trying to figure out when it's appropriate to laugh and when it's not. ~ M.B. Julien

You can't settle for reaching other people's limits. You have to reach yours. ~ Julien Smith

Politics bores you?" Bronsen said.
Julien smiled. "It does. Apologies, sir, and it is not that I haven't tried to be fascinated. But careful and meticulous research has suggested the hypothesis that all politicians are liars, fools, and tricksters, and I have as yet come across no evidence to the contrary. They can do great damage, and rarely any good. It is the job of the sensible man to try and protect civilization from their depradations. ~ Iain Pears

Besides, before contemplating starting a new life, you need to make something of this one. ~ Maude Julien

You don't know anyone at the party, so you don't want to go. You don't like cottage cheese, so you haven't eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don't kid yourself: it's also the flinch.

Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it's really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy.

You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can't write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that's really not you. It's not ingrained. It's not your personality. You personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like.

If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it's the only way.

Set fire to your old self. It's not needed here. It's too busy shopping, gossiping about others, and watching days go by and asking why you haven't gotten as far as you'd like. This old self will die and be forgotten by all but family, and replaced by someone who makes a difference.

Your new self is not like that. Your new self is the Great Chicago Fire - overwhelming, overpowering, and destroying everything ~ Julien Smith

Everything you are used to, once done long enough, starts to seem natural, even though it might not be. ~ Julien Smith

A novelist is like a scout commissioned to go and see what is happening in the depth of the soul. He comes back and reports what he has observed. He never lives on the surface but only inhabits the darkest regions ~ Julien Green

The footman burst in, announcing, 'Monsieur le Duc de
.'
'Hold your tongue, you fool,' said the Duke as he entered the room. He said this so well, and with such majesty than Julien could not help thinking that knowing how to lose his temper with a footman was the whole extent of this great personage's knowledge. ~ Stendhal

It's not funny. How would you like it if your balls fled in fear? My balls haven't been this frightened since I dove into the icy water at the Polar Bear Plunge my first year of high school. ~ K.C. Faelan

Those who are unwilling to face the flinch are obvious, too. Their eyes are dead. Their voices sound defeated. They have defensive body language. They're all talk. They see obstacles as assailants instead of adversaries. Their flinch is the elephant in the room, and they don't want to hear about it. Any fight you want to win, a habit of pushing past the flinch can make it happen. Once you have adjusted to the pressure, once you learn to flinch forward, you have the resolve to pass through the impassible. In fact, it becomes certain that you will - it's only a matter of time. ~ Julien Smith

Nothing contemporary is as extreme or as strongly stated as what the Sex Pistols were able to do in their time. ~ Julien Temple

I always felt there was kind of a millennial aspect to The Sex Pistols. ~ Julien Temple

Let us then submit to an invincible ignorance on which our happiness depends. ~ Julien Offray De La Mettrie

Julien felt himself to be strong and resolute like a man who sees clearly into his own heart. ~ Stendhal

Verbal communication is much easier than written communication, because words act on the feelings in a mysterious way and easily establish a current of sympathy between people; it is for this reason that an orator is able to produce conviction by arguments which do not seem very comprehensible to any one reading the speech later. ~ Georges Sorel

At (UNHCR's) headquarters, I met extraordinary people, men and women, especially from the emergency team, who shared with me their passion, their dedication and their commitment to this organisation and refugees. They told me about the daily difficulties they have to face and also the joy they felt when they managed to save a person whose life was threatened. ~ Julien Clerc

but the force of traditions, as in all crumbling empires, grows proportionately with the explicit revelation, in the machinery of government and commerce alike, of the preponderant action of all principles of inertia... ~ Julien Gracq

Getting lost is not fatal. Almost every time, it will make your world. ~ Julien Smith

The truth is that judgment and fear will never stop, but they don't actually do anything. ~ Julien Smith

I looked down at this city, this civilization, and I realized just how little I really knew about a world where there was so much to know. ~ M.B. Julien

Parents are toxic to the children and children are poison to the parents. No one with childrens is 'appy. ~ Julien Grenier In WISHBONE

It is convention and arbitrary rewards which make all the merit and demerit of what we call vice and virtue. ~ Julien Offray De La Mettrie

Hate is able to provoke disorders, to ruin a social organization, to cast a country into a period of bloody revolutions; but it produces nothing. ~ Georges Sorel

Perhaps the greatest consolation of the oppressed is to consider themselves superior to their tyrants. ~ Julien Green

In Paris, Julien's position with regard to Madame de Renal would very soon have been simplified; but in Paris love is the child of the novels. The young tutor and his timid mistress would have found in three or four novels, and even in the lyrics of the Gymnase, a clear statement of their situation. The novels would have outlined for them the part to be played, shown them the model to copy; and this model, sooner or later, albeit without the slightest pleasure, and perhaps with reluctance, vanity would have compelled Julien to follow.

In a small town of the Aveyron or the Pyrenees, the slightest incident would have been made decisive by the ardour of the climate. Beneath our more sombre skies, a penniless young man, who is ambitious only because the refinement of his nature puts him in need of some of those pleasures which money provides, is in daily contact with a woman of thirty who is sincerely virtuous, occupied with her children, and never looks to novels for examples of conduct. Everything goes slowly, everything happens by degrees in the provinces: life is more natural. ~ Stendhal

It's not the light that's attracting me, but the darkness that's driving me on. ~ Julien Torma

Every woman who has ever approached me about being in my circle of lovers knows that I'm a bachelor with no plans to get married. Thanks to New York's tabloids, it's practically common knowledge. And, to avoid any possibility of doubt or misunderstanding, I very clearly told her from the start what I tell every potential lover: I don't date anyone exclusively. Ever. ~ Zack Love

The perversity of woman!' thought Julien. 'What pleasure, what instinct leads them to betray us? ~ Anonymous

Who lives as a citizen, may write as a philosopher - but write as a philosopher, it is to teach materialism! ~ Julien Offray De La Mettrie

Everyone is born with psychic abilities. It's just a matter of knowing how to tap into it. ~ Julien Offray De La Mettrie

I have always thought that by observing things with a great deal of attention you eventually wrest some of their secrets from them, making them utter what they would most like to keep to themselves. ~ Julien Green