France

🇫🇷Oscar Wilde

Literature

Aestheticism

1854–1900

"[On Bernard Shaw] An excellent man: he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him."

🇫🇷Gustave Flaubert

Literature

Realism

1821–1880

"The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him. (18 March 1857)"

🇫🇷Albert Camus

Literature

continental philosophy

1913–1960

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

🇫🇷René Descartes

Philosophy

rationalism

1596–1650

"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries."

🇫🇷Jean-Paul Sartre

Philosophy

Existentialism

1905–1980

"I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens."

🇫🇷Marcel Proust

Literature

1871–1922

"On ne reçoit pas la sagesse, il faut la découvrir soi-même après un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous épargner."

🇫🇷Voltaire

Philosophy

Enlightenment

1694–1778

"The king has sent me some of his dirty linen to wash; I will wash yours another time."

🇫🇷Louis Pasteur

Science

1904–1989

"God grant that by my persevering labours I may bring a little stone to the frail and ill-assured edifice of our knowledge of those deep mysteries of Life and Death where all our intellects have so lamentably failed."

🇫🇷Simone de Beauvoir

Philosophy

Existentialism

1908–1986

"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion"

🇫🇷Michel Foucault

Literature

atheism

1926–1984

"The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines."

🇫🇷Guy Debord

Philosophy

Situationist International

1931–1994

"In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation."

🇫🇷Emmanuel Levinas

Philosophy

Existentialism

1906–1995

"To ignore the true God is in fact only half an evil; atheism is worth more than the piety bestowed on mythical gods."

🇫🇷Alain Badiou

Philosophy

b. 1937

"If the establishment of the thesis 'mathematics is ontology' is the basis of this book, it is in no way its goal."

🇫🇷Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Philosophy

structuralism

1908–1961

"De Lubac discusses an atheism which means to suppress this searching, he says, “even including the problem as to what is responsible for the birth of God in human consciousness."

🇫🇷Simone Weil

Philosophy

1909–1943

"The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege."

🇫🇷James Baldwin

Social Activism

1924–1987

"I am beginning to feel like part of a travelling circus."

🇫🇷Frantz Fanon

Philosophy

decoloniality

1925–1961

"We are nothing on earth if we are not in the first place the slaves of a cause, the cause of the peoples, the cause of justice and liberty."

🇫🇷Jacques Derrida

Philosophy

Phenomenology

1930–2004

"I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts."

🇫🇷Alexis de Tocqueville

Politics

1805–1859

"The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle."

🇫🇷Gilles Deleuze

Philosophy

materialism

1925–1995

"One of the principal motifs of Nietzsche’s work is that Kant had not carried out a true critique because he was not able to pose the problem of critique in terms of values."

🇫🇷Jean Baudrillard

Philosophy

Post-structuralism

1929–2007

"There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea."

🇫🇷Joseph Joubert

Literature

1754–1824

"It is not light that burns, that purifies, that consumes, that divides, and that recomposes; it is fire. And this fire we are talking about always follows light."

🇫🇷Napoleon I of France

Politics

1769–1821

"A King should sacrifice the best affections of his heart for the good of his country; no sacrifice should be above his determination."

🇫🇷Henri Matisse

Art

Impressionism

1869–1954

"I don't paint things. I only paint the differences between things."

🇫🇷Jean-Baptiste Say

Business

1767–1832

"Demand and supply are the opposite extremes of the beam, whence depend the scales of dearness and cheapness; the price is the point of equilibrium, where the momentum of the one ceases, and that of the other begins."

🇫🇷André Malraux

Literature

1901–1976

"Though man's feeling for the other-worldly often has recourse to solitude, solitude does not foster its development; rather, it is nourished by communion, to which the church is more propitious than the cemetery."

🇫🇷Françoise Sagan

Literature

1935–2004

"I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love."

🇫🇷Jacques Ellul

Literature

degrowth

1912–1994

"We must unmask the ideological falsehoods of the many powers, and especially we must show that the famous theory of the rule of law which lulls the democracies is a lie from beginning to end."

"The fact that Communism and Fascism assigned contradictory roles to history and reason—the emancipation of the proletariat versus the domination of the Aryan race—mattered little."

🇫🇷Étienne Gilson

Philosophy

1884–1978

"While Descartes finds being in thought, Saint Thomas finds thought in being."

🇫🇷Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Literature

1900–1944

"That is the hardest thing of all. It is much harder to judge yourself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself, it's because you're truly a wise man."

🇫🇷Giuseppe Mazzini

Politics

1805–1872

"Country is not a mere zone of territory. The true country is the Idea to which it gives birth; it is the Thought of love, the sense of communion which unites in one all the sons of that territory."

🇫🇷Claude Monet

Art

Modernism

1840–1926

"is particularly remarkable and there is enough here to paint for a life-time."

🇫🇷Alessandro Cagliostro

Medicine

1743–1795

"Heaven forgets, or tolerates—waiting for you to reform"

🇫🇷Claude Lévi-Strauss

Science

Structuralism

1908–2009

"Nature has only a limited number of procedures at her disposal and that the kinds of procedure which Nature uses at one level of reality are bound to reappear at different levels."

🇫🇷Jacques Delors

Politics

1925–2023

"allows democratic control and can punish abuses of power. Only federalism can guarantee respect for national character and regional variety. ... The springtime of Europe is still before us."

🇫🇷Nicolas Chamfort

Politics

1760–1794

"A man well-known to be a liar had just told a most improbable story. “Sir, while I believe you,” someone said, “you must admit that it's very wrong of truth not to condescend to be more plausible."

🇫🇷Stendhal

Psychology

Realism

1783–1842

"In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives."

🇫🇷Roland Barthes

semiotic literary criticism

Structuralism

1915–1980

"Roland Barthes and Photography by Ron Burnett"