Jean Paul Quotes

Nations and men are only the best when they are the gladdest, and deserve heaven when they enjoy it.

See, indeed, that your daughter is thoroughly grounded and experienced in household duties; but take care, through religion and poetry, to keep her heart open to heaven.

feelings of man are always pure and the brightest to the meeting time and Farewell.

Doing fashion drawings was the only way I had to express myself when I was a teenager.

I could say that making clothes is my way of communicating, because I was always so shy.

I start each collection thinking how I can refresh my classics.

I take life as it happens. And I give myself a lot of freedom.

If it's too fashiony, it's not interesting to me.

People are fed up with something when it becomes more and more popular.

What is masculine and what is feminine, anyway?

I'm still astounded by some people's reaction to things I consider quite normal.

I am very lucky because I am realizing my childhood dreams, and after presenting my shows it's like a party.

Clothes became my attraction and obsession early. I wasn't so interested in dressing myself because I was not my object of desire.

I will stay in my bed!

People think that everyone wears black in France; in fact they all wear grey.

I've always felt more at home in the UK than in France.

The great thing about American women is their energy and the way they love to dress.

I know what I am able and not able to do. Fashion? OK. Fashion... clothes in theatre, in an opera, in a concert - all that I love. To make a movie myself... no!

I am impressed by the way Annie Kevans captured the different types of beauties that have been my inspiration and my muses from my grandmother to artists like David Bowie and Boy George.

In France, history is paralyzing.

In America, women are powerful and strong, determined. If they want to be an object, they choose to be in control.

I was lucky to have parents who loved me.

I was fascinated by movies from age 12.

Fish is meant to tempt as well as nourish, and everything that lives in water is seductive.

Everything comes to us from others. To Be is to belong to someone.

There is no salvation anywhere. The idea of salvation implies the idea of an absolute.

A madman's ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.

Man is condemned to be free

Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.

I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature.

I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers? Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.

A Soviet citizen, an official writer, once said to me: "The day when Communism (that is, well-being for everyone) reigns, man's tragedy will begin: his finitude."

It is no longer possible to escape men. Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men.

I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe! To Believe!

I am myself and I am here.

One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.

A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

An individual chooses and makes himself.

I am finishing a biography of [Gustave] Flaubert. Because he is the opposite of what I am. One needs to rub up against argument.

This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy; we feel that our existence is justified.

The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man.

There it is: I am gently slipping into the water's depths, towards fear.

If I did not publish this autobiography [Les Mots] sooner and in its most radical form, it is because I considered it exaggerated.

The plight of modern man is that he is condemmed to be free.

As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.

To be responsible is to be the uncontested author of an event or thing.

Words There is no good father, that's the rule. Don't lay the blame on men but on the bond of paternity, which is rotten. To beget children, nothing better; to have them, what iniquity!

Hell is for other people.

Listen to me: a family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?