"It's funny, though, you know? Everyone would like to be different from the others, but instead you want to be the same as everyone else."

Il Conformista (1970)

"There’s also a danger that it becomes this thing, that you’re constantly seeking this validation, that you’re trying to do something to get a particular response. I don’t like that type of acting ... Bad acting is being self-aware, being self-conscious."

Joaquin Phoenix

« [Flaubert] lie cette propension à prendre au sérieux les illusions de l'art et de l'amour et à n'affronter le réel qu'au travers d'une anticipation littéraire vouée à la désillusion, à une sorte de pathologie de la croyance primordiale dans la réalité des jeux sociaux, à une incapacité à entrer dans l'illusio comme illusion de réalité collectivement partagée et approuvée. Il rattache explicitement cette inclination irrépressible à fuir dans la fiction, qu'il partage avec Frédéric, et qui'il accomplit activement par l'écriture d'une oeuvre oú il l'objective, à une sorte d'impuissance à prendre au sérieux les jeux de société les plus réels, le monde du sens commun, de l'expérience doxique du monde commun que procure une socialisation réussie, c'est-à-dire capable d'assurer l'incorporation des structures partagées qui fondent ce que Durkehim appelle le « conformisme logique », et, par là, le consensus sur le monde »

Pierre Bourdieu, Les règles de l'art

"For St. Thomas Aquinas, beauty was a means of gaining a knowledge of goodness and truth; the ordering inherent in the senses created the preconditions necessary for this to happen. The delectatur in rebus (pleasure in things) was therefore attributable to the realm of knowledge rather than the realm of feeling. Aquinas never discussed pure feeling in this context."

Ehrenfried Kluckert

"The work of the philosophical policeman, is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime."

G.K. Chesterton

"Berlioz's high tenor rang out in the deserted walk, and as Mikhail Alexandrovich went deeper into the maze, which only a highly educated man can go into without risking a broken neck, the poet learned more and more interesting and useful things about the Egyptian Osiris [...]"

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

"Man plans and God laughs"
or, as quoted by Milan Kundera in his Jerusalem Speech:
« L'homme pense, Dieu rit. »

Yiddish proverb

"We humans are not naturally born into reality. In order for us to act as normal people who interact with other people who live in the space of social reality, many things should happen, like we should be properly installed within the symbolic order and so on. When this, our proper dwelling within a symbolic space, is disturbed, reality disintegrates."

Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006)

« Oui, la bêtise consiste à vouloir conclure. »

Gustave Flaubert

« Mme Arnoux regardait au loin d'une manière vague. Quand la musique s'arrêta, elle remua les paupières plusieures fois, comme si elle sortait d'un songe. »

Gustave Flaubert, L'Éducation sentimentale

Woman: I know I'm not very good [at making love].
Jep Gambardella: Why do you say that? It's so sad being good, you risk becoming deft.

La Grande Bellezza (2013)

"When I went to high school I had a teacher, in the arts, who was head of the department of Central High, William Grey, and he gave a course in Architecture, the only course in any high school I am sure, in Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Egyptian, and Gothic Architecture, and at that point two of my colleagues and myself realized that only Architecture was to be my life. How accidental are our existences are really, and how full of influence by circumstance."

Louis Kahn in My Architect: A Son's Journey (2003)

« J'ai entrepris l'histoire de toute la Société. J'ai exprimé souvent mon plan dans cette seule phrase : une génération est un drame à quatre ou cinq mille personnages saillants. Ce drame, c'est mon livre. »

Honoré de Balzac, Lettre à Hippolyte de Castille, 11 octobre 1846

"In our relations with other people, we mainly discuss and evaluate their character and behavior. That is why I have withdrawn from nearly all so-called relations."

Professor Isak Borg / Wild Strawberries (1957)

"After two years of training he went to sea, and entering the regions so well known to his imagination, found them strangely barren of adventure"

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

« L'absence d'envie de vivre, hélas, ne suffit pas pour avoir envie de mourir. »

Michel Houellebecq, Plateforme

"Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk."

Henry Miller, The Paris Review No. 28

Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

"I thought we were happy. We have never been so close. Do you remember saying, 'I'm beginning to understand what it means to be married '? 'You have taught me that we have to see each other as two anxious children, filled with good will and the best intentions, but ruled by powers that we can only partially control.'Do you remember saying all that? We went for a walk in the woods, and you stopped and grabbed the belt of my coat."

Persona (1966)

"The most important thing is: focus on the ball, and the team, and not yourself. And when you do that, it will take you a long way."

Brendan Rodgers en passant

"A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp. And the world seems so fresh as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be."

George / A Single Man (2009)

"Over the years you get to see what a struggle life is for most people, how tough it is, how easy it is to be judgmental and criticise and stand outside of situations and impart your wisdom and judgment. But over the decades I've got more tolerant of people's flaws and mistakes. Everybody makes a lot of them. When you're younger you feel: 'Hey, this person is evil' or 'This person is a jerk' or stupid or 'What's wrong with them?' Then you go through life and you think: 'Well, it's not so easy.' There's a lot of mystery and suffering and complication. Everybody's out there trying to do the best they can. And it's not such an easy business."

Woody Allen for The Guardian

"How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be
When there's no help in truth!"

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

« Oui et c'est justement parce qu'elle est capable de regarder la mort en face que Gloria aime autant la vie, et que j'ai une connexion avec ce personnage. On dit que la mort est mère de toute beauté, et je le crois profondément. »

Sebastián Lelio en passant

"But - but - why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy? As a person who has dropped some grain of pearl or diamond into the grass and parts the tall blades very carefully, this way and that, and searches here and there vainly, and at last spies it there at the roots, so she went through one thing and another."

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway