Michel Durand Quotes

You may not be aware, ma douce, but not all vampyre have a kindred, some will live out their existence without such beauty in their lives. I have waited five hundred years for you. ~ Nicola Claire

Glory consists of two parts: the one in setting too great a value upon ourselves, and the other in setting too little a value upon others. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Can anything be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable and wretched creature [man], who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole? ~ Michel De Montaigne

Irony won't save you from anything; humour doesn't do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn't matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you've developed a sense of humour, you still end up with your heart broken. That's when you stop laughing. ~ Michel Houellebecq

All too often modern man becomes the plaything of his circumstances because he no longer has any leisure time; he doesn't know how to provide himself with the leisure he needs to stop to take a good look at himself. ~ Michel Quoist

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Relentlessly feeding on poverty and economic dislocation, a New World Order was taking shape. ~ Michel Chossudovsky

It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump. ~ Michel De Montaigne

The country makes me more paranoid, you know? I think the crazy people out there are little crazier. ~ Jean-Michel Basquiat

Government is defined as a right manner of disposing things so as to lead not to the form of the common good, as the jurists' texts would have said, but to an end which is 'convenient' for each of the things that are to governed. This implies a plurality of specific aims: for instance, government will have t ensure that the greatest possible quantity of wealth is produced, that the people are provided with sufficient means of subsistence, that the population in enabled to multiply, etc. There is a whole series of specific finalities, then, which become the objective of government as such. In order to achieve these various finalities, things be disposed - and this term, [i] dispose [/i], is important because with sovereignity the instrument that allowed it to achieve its aim - that is to say, obedience to the laws - was the law itself; law and sovereignity were absolutely inseparable. ~ Michel Foucault

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think. ~ Michel Foucault

Aesop, that great man, saw his master making water as he walked. "What!" he said, "Must we void ourselves as we run?" Use our timeas best we may, yet a great part of it will still be idly and ill spent. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Even beauty may present a prism wearying to the eye. ~ Michel, 14th Prince Of Ligne

For months beforehand, I fielded calls from British media. A couple of the reporters asked me to name some British chefs who had inspired me. I mentioned the Roux brothers, Albert and Michel, and I named Marco Pierre White, not as much for his food as for how - by virtue of becoming an apron-wearing rock-star bad boy - he had broken the mold of whom a chef could be, which was something I could relate to. I got to London to find the Lanesborough dining room packed each night, a general excitement shared by everyone involved, and incredibly posh digs from which I could step out each morning into Hyde Park and take a good long run around Buckingham Palace. On my second day, I was cooking when a phone call came into the kitchen. The executive chef answered and, with a puzzled look, handed me the receiver. Trouble at Aquavit, I figured.
I put the phone up to my ear, expecting to hear Håkan's familiar "Hej, Marcus." Instead, there was screaming. "How the fuck can you come to my fucking city and think you are going to be able to cook without even fucking referring to me?" This went on for what seemed like five minutes; I was too stunned to hang up. "I'm going to make sure you have a fucking miserable time here. This is my city, you hear? Good luck, you fucking black bastard." And then he hung up.
I had cooked with Gordon Ramsay once, a couple of years earlier, when we did a promotion with Charlie Trotter in Chicago. There were a handful of chefs there, including Daniel Bou ~ Marcus Samuelsson

I wish I could print up a sign and tape it on my forehead. I OFFICIALLY DO NOT WANT TO KISS ETHAN WATE. NOW PLEASE LET ME BE FRIENDS WITH HIM. ~ Kami Garcia

God will endure for as long as the reasons that brought him into being;
And so will those who deny him. ~ Michel Onfray

We do not possess an official certificate of birth for worship of one God. But the family line is clear: the Jews invented it to endure the coherence, cohesion and existence of their small, threatened people. ~ Michel Onfray

The good opinion of the vulgar is injurious. ~ Michel De Montaigne

I don't think I'm an exceptionally bad reader. I suspect that many people, maybe even most, are like me. We read and read and read,
and we forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother? Michel de Montaigne expressed the dilemma of extensive reading in the
sixteenth century: "I leaf through books, I do not study them," he wrote. "What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else's.
It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued;
the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget." He goes on to explain how "to compensate a
little for the treachery and weakness of my memory," he adopted the habit of writing in the back of every book a short critical
judgment, so as to have at least some general idea of what the tome was about and what he thought of it. ~ Joshua Foer

'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth. ~ Michel Foucault

We seem ambitious God's whole work to undo ... With new diseases on ourselves we war, And with new physic, a worse engine far. ~ Michel De Montaigne

No passion disturbs the soundness of our judgement as anger does. ~ Michel De Montaigne

But the touch or company of any man whatsoever stirreth up their heat, which in their solitude was hushed and quiet, and lay as cinders raked up in ashes. ~ Michel De Montaigne

The knowledge of courtesy and good manners is a very necessary study. It is like grace and beauty, that which begets liking and an inclination to love one another at the first sight. ~ Michel De Montaigne

It is in vain that we get upon stilts, for once on them, it is still with our legs that we must walk. And on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own ass. ~ Michel De Montaigne

I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself ~ Michel De Montaigne

Sexual pleasure was not only superior, in refinement and violence, to all the other pleasures life had to offer; it was not only the one pleasure with which there is no collateral damage to the organism, but which on the contrary contributes to maintaining it at its highest level of vitality and strength; it was in truth the sole pleasure, the sole objective of human existence, ~ Michel Houellebecq

I'm sure my unique brain tastes the same as a normal brain. Actually, mine might be slightly tastier. ~ J. Cornell Michel

How often our involuntary facial motions testify to the thoughts we were keeping secret, and betray us to those around! ~ Michel De Montaigne

I'd feel kind of like a rat abandoning ship." "Rats are intelligent mammals," he answered calmly, almost with amusement. "They will probably outlive us. Their society, at any rate, is a good deal more stable than ours. ~ Michel Houellebecq

French people are strange about America, I think. ~ Michel Hazanavicius

I was about as political as a bath towel. ~ Michel Houellebecq

Perhaps my favourite story is 'Le Passe-Muraille' by Marcel Ayme. It's about a guy who wakes up with a weird faculty that means he can walk through walls. He's a very shy clerk, and he uses it to get revenge, or vent his frustration. ~ Michel Gondry

The greater the proportion of pure morality in a particular system, the happier and more enduring the society. ~ Michel Houellebecq

It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room. I seek out change indiscriminately and tumultuously. My style and my mine alike go roaming. A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid, say the precepts of our masters, and even more so their examples.

A thousand poets drag and languish prosaically; but the best ancient prose - and I scatter it here indiscriminately as verse - shines throughout with the vigor and boldness of poetry, and gives the effect of its frenzy. To poetry we must certainly concede mastery and preeminence in speech. The poet, says Plato, seated on the tripod of the Muses, pours out in a frenzy whatever comes into his mouth, like the spout of a fountain, without ruminating and weighing it; and from him escape things of different colors and contradictory substance in an intermittent flow. He himself is utterly poetic, and the old theology is poetry, the scholars say, and the first philosophy. It is the original language of the Gods. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Yes, our eyes may perceive, yet they do not observe; they may believe, yet they do not question; they may receive yet they do not search: they are emptied of desire, with neither hunger nor passion.(Renee Michel) ~ Muriel Barbery

It is taking one's conjectures rather seriously to roast someone alive for them. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Undoubtedly, the best way for a consumer to have a good time in the 2010s was to turn to Korean products: for a car, Kia and Hyundai; for electronics, LG and Samsung. ~ Michel Houellebecq

Love is like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart. If I were pressed to say why I loved him, I feel that my only reply could be: Because it was he, because it was I. ~ Michel De Montaigne

an intellectual didn't have to be responsible. That wasn't his job. In ~ Michel Houellebecq

A man is not hurt so much by what happens, as by his opinion of what happens. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Pessimism is a towering skyscraper eighty stories high in the suburbs of the soul at the end of a long avenue with waste ground on either side and a few poorly-stocked little shops. Several ultra-fast staircases give access to the building, running up from the cellars to the roof-gardens. The comfort of this place leaves nothing to be desired and only the greatest luxury is acceptable, but every Friday the residents gather on the ground floor to read from a bible bound in the skin of a blind man. The psalmic words they intone rise up through the pipes, sigh in the stoves and sweep the chimneys coated inside with black grease which leaves dirt on the skin. Water runs constantly in the bathrooms and the showers beat down on the numbered bodies, peppering them with sand. On Sundays the bed linen unrolls by itself and nobody makes love. For this tower block, like an obscure phallus scraping the vulva of the sky, is usually a hive of sexual activity. The most beautiful woman lives there, but no-one has ever known her. It is said, that dressed in furs and feathers, she keeps herself shut away in a first-floor apartment as if in a white safe. Her windows are scissors which cut short both shadow and breath. Her name is AURORA. ~ Michel Leiris

Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester's cap and bells. ~ Michel Foucault

An outstanding memory is often associated with weak judgement. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Sometimes God seems to be killing us when He is actually saving us. ~ Jen Pollock Michel

I want death to find me planting my cabbages. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Get a purge for your brain. It will do better than for your stomach. - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne ~ David Allen