Playwrights From France

"There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common."

"Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower."

"If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare."

"The purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race in the future years to come"

"Go further, and require each of them to make a contribution: you will see how many things are still missing, and you will be obliged to get the assistance of a large number of men who belong to different classes, priceless men, but to whom the gates of the academies are nonetheless closed because of their social station. All the members of these learned societies are more than is needed for a single object of human science; all the societies together are not sufficient for a science of man in general."

"Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian. Grace causes the Christian to act, reason the philosopher. Other men are carried away by their passions, their actions not being preceded by reflection: these are the men who walk in darkness. On the other hand, the philosopher, even in his passions, acts only after reflection; he walks in the dark, but by a torch. The philosopher forms his principles from an infinity of particular observations. Most people adopt principles without thinking of the observations that have produced them, they believe the maxims exist, so to speak, by themselves. But the philosopher takes maxims from their source; he examines their origin; he knows their proper value, and he makes use of them only in so far as they suit him. Truth is not for the philosopher a mistress who corrupts his imagination and whom he believes to be found everywhere; he contents himself with being able to unravel it where he can perceive it. He does not confound it with probability; he takes for true what is true, for false what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is only probable. He does more, and here you have a great perfection of the philosopher: when he has no reason by which to judge, he knows how to live in suspension of judgment... The philosophical spirit is, then, a spirit of observation and exactness, which relates everything to true principles..."

"The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual."

"La puissance qui s'acquiert par la violence n'est qu'une usurpation, et ne dure qu'autant que la force de celui qui commande l'emporte sur celle de ceux qui obéissent."

"Aucun homme n'a recu de la nature le droit de commander aux autres. La liberté est un présent du ciel, et chaque individu de la meme espèce a le droit d'en jouir aussitòt qu'il jouit de la raison."

"This is a work that cannot be completed except by a society of men of letters and skilled workmen, each working separately on his own part, but all bound together solely by their zeal for the best interests of the human race and a feeling of mutual good will."

"We do not know nature; causes hidden in her breast might have produced everything. In your turn, observe the polyp of Trembley: does it not contain in itself the causes which bring about regeneration? Why then would it be absurd to think that there are physical causes by reason of which everything has been made, and to which the whole chain of this vast universe is so necessarily bound and held that, nothing which happens, could have failed to happen,—causes, of which we are so invincibly ignorant that we have had recourse to a God, who, as some aver, is not so much as a logical entity? Thus to destroy chance is not to prove the existence of a supreme being, since there may be some other thing which is neither chance nor God—I mean, nature. It follows that the study of nature can make only unbelievers; and the way of thinking of all its more successful investigators proves this."

"To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him."

"To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature."

"Scepticism is the first step towards truth."

"Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism."

"We are constantly railing against the passions; we ascribe to them all of man’s afflictions, and we forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures … But what provokes me is that only their adverse side is considered … and yet only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded."

"There is no good father who would want to resemble our Heavenly Father"

"On doit exiger de moi que je cherche la vérité, mais non que je la trouve."

"The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children."

"To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!"

"When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music."

"[Jews are] angry and brutish people, vile and vulgar men, slaves worthy of the yoke [Talmudism] which you bear... Go, take back your books and remove yourselves from me. [ The Talmud ] taught the Jews to steal the goods of Christians, to regard them as savage beasts, to push them over the precipice... to kill them with impunity and to utter every morning the most horrible imprecations against them."

"Happiest are the people who give most happiness to others."

"There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint."

"I believe in God, although I live very happily with atheists... It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but not at all so to believe or not in God."

"I am beginning to feel that I am growing old; soon, I shall have to eat mush like children. I shall no longer be able to speak, which will be a rather great advantage for others and but a small inconvenience for myself.... The time in which I count in years is gone; that in which I count in days is here.... I had thought that the fibers of the heart would grow callous with age, it's not at all the case. I am not sure that my sensitivity hasn't increased; everything moves me, affects me.... To fade out between a man feeling your pulse and another bothering your head; not to know where one comes from, why one came, where one is going ..."

"There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it."

"Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other."

"We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates."

"Distance is a great promoter of admiration!"

"[Africans are] always vicious... mostly inclined to lasciviousness, vengeance, theft and lies."

"The best doctor is the one you run for and can't find."

"Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory."

"Ah que je— Vous l'avez voulu, vous l'avez voulu, George Dandin, vous l'avez voulu, cela vous sied fort bien, et vous voilà ajusté comme il faut, vous avez justement ce que vous méritez."

"But Comedy justly treated, as you find it in Molière, whom we so clownishly mishandled, the Comedy of Molière throws no infamous reflection upon life. It is deeply conceived, in the first place, and therefore it cannot be impure. Meditate on that statement. Never did man wield so shrieking a scourge upon vice, but his consummate self-mastery is not shaken while administering it. Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are made each to whip himself and his class, the false pietists, and the insanely covetous. Molière has only set them in motion. He strips Folly to the skin, displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer her better clothing, with the lesson Chrysale reads to Philaminte and Bélise. He conceives purely, and he writes purely, in the simplest language, the simplest of French verse. The source of his wit is clear reason: it is a fountain of that soil; and it springs to vindicate reason, common-sense, rightness and justice; for no vain purpose ever. The wit is of such pervading spirit that it inspires a pun with meaning and interest. His moral does not hang like a tail, or preach from one character incessantly cocking an eye at the audience, as in recent realistic French Plays; but is in the heart of his work, throbbing with every pulsation of an organic structure. If Life is likened to the comedy of Molière, there is no scandal in the comparison."

"Il faut manger pour vivre, et non pas vivre pour manger."

"Un sot savant est sot plus qu'un sot ignorant."

"Il est de sel attique assaisonné partout."

"La grammaire qui sait régenter jusqu'aux rois."

"Je le soutiendrai devant tout le monde."

"Jurons, ma belle, Une ardeur éternelle."

"Ah, la belle chose que de savoir quelque chose."

"Par ma foi, il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose, sans que j'en susse rien."

"Tout ce qui n'est point prose, est vers; et tout ce qui n'est point vers, est prose."

"Vous parlez devant un homme à qui tout Naples est connu."

"Les beaux yeux de ma cassette."

"[J]e veux que tu me dises à qui lu parles quand lu dis cela. Je parle... je parle à mon bonnet."

"Le Seigneur Jupiter sait dorer la pilule."

"Le véritable Amphitryon, Est l'Amphitryon où l'on dine."

"J'aime mieux un vice commode, Qu'une fatigante vertu."