Category Archives: Quotations

Mot d’un Moucheron

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« Que me proposent-ils là, les imprudents ! Parce que j’ai remué quelques grains de sable sur le rivage, suis-je en état de connaître les abîmes océaniques ? La vie a des secrets, insondables. Le savoir humain sera rayé des archives du monde avant que nous ayons le dernier mot d’un moucheron. » — Souvenirs entomologiques de Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915)

— “What do they want from me, those imprudent ones? Because I’ve lifted a few grains of sand on the shore, am I ready to sound the ocean’s depths? Life has secrets, unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from the world’s archives before we have the last word on a gnat.”

2 < 1

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«У Менделеева две жены, но Менделеев-то у меня один!» — Царь Алекса́ндр II

• “Yes, Mendeleev has two wives, but I have only one Mendeleev!” — Tsar Alexander II responds to a complaint about Mendeleev’s bigamy

Figure Philia

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“I love figures, it gives me an intense satisfaction to deal with them, they’re living things to me, and now that I can handle them all day long I feel myself again.” — the imprisoned accountant Jean Charvin in W. Somerset Maugham’s short-story “A Man with a Conscience” (1939)

Sóccrates Says…

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“A beleza vem primeiro. A vitória é secundária. O que importa é a alegria.” — Sócrates, o futebolista brasileiro
• “Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is joy.” — Brazilian footballer Sócrates

I’ve also found the quote as:

“A beleza está primeiro. A vitória é secundária. O que é interessa é o prazer.”
• “Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is pleasure.”

Reflet de Robert

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[I]t was hard to pierce Robert de Montesquiou’s carapace — and he wouldn’t have wanted you to. He was perhaps at heart a melancholic: he liked to say that his mother had “given me the sad present of life”. His restlessness and furious inquisitiveness might have been a response to this. He was vain without being especially self-reflective, one of those who, rather than look inside to discover who they are, prefer to see themselves in the reflections that come back from others. — Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat (2019), pp. 192-3

Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

• Portait of a Peacock — Cornelia Otis Skinner’s essay on Montesquiou
• Le Paon dans les Pyrénées — review of Barnes’ The Man in the Red Coat

Chevaleurs Oniriques

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« Les valeurs oniriques l’ont définitivement emporté sur les autres et je demande à ce qu’on tienne pour un crétin celui qui se refuserait encore, par exemple, à voir un cheval galoper sur une tomate. » André Breton (1896-1966)
• “Oneiric values have definitely won out over the others, and I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot.” — André Breton, viâ Soluble Fish by Incunabula Media

Renoir et la Reine Noire

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« Le noir, une non-couleur ? Où avez-vous encore pris cela ? Le noir, mais c’est la reine des couleurs ! » — Renoir (1841-1919)
• “Black, a non-color? Where did you get that idea? Black, why, it’s the queen of colors!”