269 quotes found
"Je veux qu'on me voit en ma façon simple, naturelle, et ordinaire, sans étude et artifice; car c'est moi que je peins...Je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre."
"Certes, c'est un subject merveilleusement vain, divers, et ondoyant, que l'homme. Il est malaisé d'y fonder jugement constant et uniforme."
"All passions that suffer themselves to be relished and digested are but moderate."
"A strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment."
"It is not without good reason said, that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying."
"I live from day to day, and content myself with having enough to meet my present and ordinary needs; for the extraordinary, all the provision in the world could not suffice."
"Every rich man is avaricious, in my opinion."
"How many we know who have fled the sweetness of a tranquil life in their homes, among their friends, to seek the horror of uninhabitable deserts; who have flung themselves into humiliation, degradation, and the contempt of the world, and have enjoyed these and even sought them out."
"Things are not so painful and difficult of themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so."
"We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, which is the cause that what we believe we do not believe, and cannot disengage ourselves from what we condemn."
"C'est ce de quoi j'ai le plus de peur que la peur."
"He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live."
"Whatever can be done another day can be done today."
"Je veux que la mort me trouve plantant mes choux."
"All the opinions of the world agree in this, that pleasure is our end."
"He who would teach men to die would teach them to live."
"The day of your birth is one day’s advance towards the grave."
"Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead."
"Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can imagine never to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? and yet there is no journey but hath its end. And, if company will make it more pleasant or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self-same way?"
"All of the days go toward death and the last one arrives there."
"The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom."
"We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there."
"Every other knowledge is harmful to him who does not have knowledge of goodness."
"To call out for the hand of the enemy is a rather extreme measure, yet a better one, I think, than to remain in continual fever over an accident that has no remedy. But since all the precautions that a man can take are full of uneasiness and uncertainty, it is better to prepare with fine assurance for the worst that can happen, and derive some consolation from the fact that we are not sure that it will happen."
"Un peu de chaque chose, et rien du tout, a la française."
"Je ne dis les autres, sinon pour d'autant plus me dire."
"Since I would rather make of him an able man than a learned man, I would also urge that care be taken to choose a guide with a well-made rather than a well-filled head."
"Accustom him to every thing, that he may not be a Sir Paris, a carpet-knight, but a sinewy, hardy, and vigorous young man."
"Combien de choses nous servoyent hier d’articles de foy, qui nous sont fables aujourd’huy?"
"We were halves throughout, and to that degree that, methinks, by outliving him I defraud him of his part."
"Si on me presse de dire pourquoi je l'aimais, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer qu'en répondant: parce que c'était lui; parce que c'était moi."
"There are some defeats more triumphant than victories."
"... il n'est rien creu si fermement que ce qu'on sçait le moins, ..."
"A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself."
"L'homme d'entendement n'a rien perdu, s'il a soi-même."
"La plus grande chose du monde, c'est de savoir être à soi."
"Even opinion is of force enough to make itself to be espoused at the expense of life."
"He who does not give himself leisure to be thirsty cannot take pleasure in drinking."
"Les rois et les philosophes fientent, et les dames aussi."
"God's justice and His power are inseparable; 'tis in vain we invoke His power in an unjust cause. We are to have our souls pure and clean, at that moment at least wherein we pray to Him, and purified from all vicious passions; otherwise we ourselves present Him the rods wherewith to chastise us; instead of repairing anything we have done amiss, we double the wickedness and the offence when we offer to Him, to whom we are to sue for pardon, an affection full of irreverence and hatred. Which makes me not very apt to applaud those whom I observe to be so frequent on their knees, if the actions nearest to the prayer do not give me some evidence of amendment and reformation"
"A true prayer and religious reconciling of ourselves to Almighty God cannot enter into an impure soul, subject at the very time to the dominion of Satan. He who calls God to his assistance whilst in a course of vice, does as if a cut-purse should call a magistrate to help him, or like those who introduce the name of God to the attestation of a lie."
"There is nothing so easy, so sweet, and so favourable, as the divine law: it calls and invites us to her, guilty and abominable as we are; extends her arms and receives us into her bosom, foul and polluted as we at present are, and are for the future to be. But then, in return, we are to look upon her with a respectful eye; we are to receive this pardon with all gratitude and submission, and for that instant at least, wherein we address ourselves to her, to have the soul sensible of the ills we have committed, and at enmity with those passions that seduced us to offend her."
"There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others."
"It is the part of cowardice, not of courage, to go and crouch in a hole under a massive tomb, to avoid the blows of fortune."
"C'est une épineuse entreprise, et plus qu'il ne semble, de suivre une allure si vagabonde que celle de nôtre esprit; de pénétrer les profondeurs opaques de ses replis internes; de choisir et arrêter tant de menus de ses agitations."
"Mon métier et mon art, c'est vivre."
"I am angry at the custom of forbidding children to call their father by the name of father, and to enjoin them another, as more full of respect and reverence, as if nature had not sufficiently provided for our authority. We call Almighty God Father, and disdain to have our children call us so. I have reformed this error in my family.—[As did Henry IV of France]—And 'tis also folly and injustice to deprive children, when grown up, of familiarity with their father, and to carry a scornful and austere countenance toward them, thinking by that to keep them in awe and obedience; for it is a very idle farce that, instead of producing the effect designed, renders fathers distasteful, and, which is worse, ridiculous to their own children."
"Virtue refuses facility for her companion ... the easy, gentle, and sloping path that guides the footsteps of a good natural disposition is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road."
"For my own part, I cannot without grief see so much as an innocent beast pursued and killed that has no defence, and from which we have received no offence at all."
"Que sais-je?"
"Quand je me joue à ma chatte, qui sait si elle passe son temps de moi, plus que je ne fais d'elle."
"All that is under heaven, says the sage, runs one law and one fortune."
"As to fidelity, there is no animal in the world so treacherous as man. Our histories have recorded the violent pursuits that dogs have made after the murderers of their masters."
"The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold...The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes."
"The plague of man is boasting of his knowledge."
"The first law that ever God gave to man was a law of pure obedience; it was a commandment naked and simple, wherein man had nothing to inquire after, nor to dispute; forasmuch as to obey is the proper office of a rational soul, acknowledging a heavenly superior and benefactor."
"The participation we have in the knowledge of truth, such as it is, is not acquired by our own force: God has sufficiently given us to understand that, by the witnesses he has chosen out of the common people, simple and ignorant men, that he has been pleased to employ to instruct us in his admirable secrets. Our faith is not of our own acquiring; 'tis purely the gift of another's bounty: 'tis not by meditation, or by virtue of our own understanding, that we have acquired our religion, but by foreign authority and command wherein the imbecility of our own judgment does more assist us than any force of it; and our blindness more than our clearness of sight: 'tis more by__ the mediation of our ignorance than of our knowledge that we know any thing of the divine wisdom. 'Tis no wonder if our natural and earthly parts cannot conceive that supernatural and heavenly knowledge: let us bring nothing of our own, but obedience and subjection; for, as it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.""
"Of all human and ancient opinions concerning religion, that seems to me the most likely and most excusable, that acknowledged God as an incomprehensible power, the original and preserver of all things, all goodness, all perfection, receiving and taking in good part the honour and reverence that man paid him, under what method, name, or ceremonies soever"
"Man is forming thousands of ridiculous relations between himself and God."
"We are brought to a belief of God either by reason or by force. Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have, nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience. Yet will they not fail to lift up their hands towards heaven if you give them a good thrust with a sword in the breast, and when fear or sickness has abated and dulled the licentious fury of this giddy humour they will easily re-unite, and very discreetly suffer themselves to be reconciled to the public faith and examples."
"To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom."
"L'homme est bien insensé. Il ne saurait forger un ciron, et forge des Dieux à douzaines."
"Quelle vérité que ces montagnes bornent, qui est mensonge qui se tient au delà?"
"Ceux qui ont apparié notre vie à un songe ont eu de la raison. ... Nous veillons dormants et veillants dormons."
"There must then be something that is better, and that must be God. When you see a stately and stupendous edifice, though you do not know who is the owner of it, you would yet conclude it was not built for rats. And this divine structure, that we behold of the celestial palace, have we not reason to believe that it is the residence of some possessor, who is much greater than we?"
"We are no nearer heaven on the top of Mount Cenis than at the bottom of the sea; take the distance with your astrolabe. They debase God even to the carnal knowledge of women, to so many times, and so many generations."
"It was truly very good reason that we should be beholden to God only, and to the favour of his grace, for the truth of so noble a belief, since from his sole bounty we receive the fruit of immortality, which consists in the enjoyment of eternal beatitude.... The more we give and confess to owe and render to God, we do it with the greater Christianity."
"God might grant us riches, honours, life, and even health, to our own hurt; for every thing that is pleasing to us is not always good for us. If he sends us death, or an increase of sickness, instead of a cure, Vvrga tua et baculus, tuus ipsa me consolata sunt. "Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me," he does it by the rule of his providence, which better and more certainly discerns what is proper for us than we can do; and we ought to take it in good part, as coming from a wise and most friendly hand"
"Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions. The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: “it seems to me.” They make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me as infallible."
"There is the name and the thing: the name is a voice which denotes and signifies the thing; the name is no part of the thing, nor of the substance; 'tis a foreign piece joined to the thing, and outside it. God, who is all fulness in Himself and the height of all perfection, cannot augment or add anything to Himself within; but His name may be augmented and increased by the blessing and praise we attribute to His exterior works: which praise, seeing we cannot incorporate it in Him, forasmuch as He can have no accession of good, we attribute to His name, which is the part out of Him that is nearest to us. Thus is it that to God alone glory and honour appertain; and there is nothing so remote from reason as that we should go in quest of it for ourselves; for, being indigent and necessitous within, our essence being imperfect, and having continual need of amelioration, 'tis to that we ought to employ all our endeavour."
"How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!"
"A man may be humble through vainglory."
"I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice."
"Saying is one thing and doing is another."
"As far as physicians go, chance is more valuable than knowledge."
"Physicians have this advantage: the sun lights their success and the earth covers their failures."
"There were never in the world two opinions alike, any more than two hairs or two grains. Their most universal quality is diversity."
"I will follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help it."
"I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old."
"Few men have been admired by their own households."
"Chaque homme porte la forme, entière de l'humaîne condition."
"For my own part, I may desire in general to be other than I am; I may condemn and dislike my whole form, and beg of Almighty God for an entire reformation, and that He will please to pardon my natural infirmity: but I ought not to call this repentance, methinks, no more than the being dissatisfied that I am not an angel or Cato. My actions are regular, and conformable to what I am and to my condition; I can do no better; and repentance does not properly touch things that are not in our power; sorrow does.. I imagine an infinite number of natures more elevated and regular than mine; and yet I do not for all that improve my faculties, no more than my arm or will grow more strong and vigorous for conceiving those of another to be so."
"Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom, and poisons itself."
"Non pudeat dicere, quod non pudet sentire: "Let no man be ashamed to speak what he is not ashamed to think.""
"It (marriage) happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out."
"Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition — and perchance to some excess — I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond."
"Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie."
"A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid."
"At the very beginning of my fevers and sicknesses that cast me down, whilst still entire, and but little, disordered in health, I reconcile myself to Almighty God by the last Christian, offices, and find myself by so doing less oppressed and more easy, and have got, methinks, so much the better of my disease. And I have yet less need of a notary or counsellor than of a physician."
"Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself."
"I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself."
"J'ai seulement fait ici un amas de fleurs étrangères, n'y ayant fourni du mien que le filet à les lier."
"‘Tis a good word and a profitable desire, but withal absurd; for to make the handle bigger than the hand, the cubic longer than the arm, and to hope to stride further than our legs can reach, is both impossible and monstrous; or that man should rise above himself and humanity; for he cannot see but with his eyes, nor seize but with his hold. He shall be exalted, if God will lend him an extraordinary hand; he shall exalt himself, by abandoning and renouncing his own proper means, and by suffering himself to be raised and elevated by means purely celestial. It belongs to our Christian faith, and not to the stoical virtue, to pretend to that divine and miraculous metamorphosis."
"God never sends evils"
"There is no wish more natural than the wish to know."
"It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other."
"For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits."
"He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents."
"Si, avons nous beau monter sur des échasses, car sur des échasses encore faut-il marcher de nos jambes. Et au plus élevé trône du monde, si ne sommes assis que sur notre cul."
"Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do."
"It would be better to have no laws at all than to have them in such profusion as we do."
"In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care; we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to man, to conduct man according to his condition; 'tis express, plain, and the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly prescribed it to us. Authority has power only to work in regard to matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language; therefore let us again charge at it in this place"
"Plato says, "'Tis to no purpose for a sober man to knock at the door of the Muses;" and Aristotle says "that no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of folly.""
"For a desperate disease a desperate cure."
"And not to serve for a table-talk."
"To which we may add this other Aristotelian consideration, that he who confers a benefit on any one loves him better than he is beloved by him again."
"The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us."
"The only good histories are those that have been written by the persons themselves who commanded in the affairs whereof they write."
"She [virtue] requires a rough and stormy passage; she will have either outward difficulties to wrestle with, ... or internal difficulties."
"There is, nevertheless, a certain respect and a general duty of humanity that ties us, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees and plants."
"Some impose upon the world that they believe that which they do not; others, more in number, make themselves believe that they believe, not being able to penetrate into what it is to believe."
"When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?"
"'T is one and the same Nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly conclude as to both the future and the past."
"The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mould…. The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbour causes a war betwixt princes."
"Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens."
"Why may not a goose say thus: "All the parts of the universe I have an interest in: the earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to light me; the stars have their influence upon me; I have such an advantage by the winds and such by the waters; there is nothing that yon heavenly roof looks upon so favourably as me. I am the darling of Nature! Is it not man that keeps and serves me?""
"Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are formed and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing, as bears leisurely lick their cubs into form."
"He that I am reading seems always to have the most force."
"Apollo said that every one's true worship was that which he found in use in the place where he chanced to be."
"How many worthy men have we seen survive their own reputation!"
"The mariner of old said to Neptune in a great tempest, "O God! thou mayest save me if thou wilt, and if thou wilt thou mayest destroy me; but whether or no, I will steer my rudder true.""
"One may be humble out of pride."
"I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice."
"Saying is one thing, doing another."
"Is it not a noble farce, wherein kings, republics, and emperors have for so many ages played their parts, and to which the whole vast universe serves for a theatre?"
"Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem."
"There never was in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity."
"The public weal requires that men should betray and lie and massacre."
"Like rowers, who advance backward."
"I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more as I grow older."
"Few men have been admired by their own domestics."
"It happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out."
"And to bring in a new word by the head and shoulders, they leave out the old one."
"All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me."
"'T is so much to be a king, that he only is so by being so. The strange lustre that surrounds him conceals and shrouds him from us; our sight is there broken and dissipated, being stopped and filled by the prevailing light."
"We are born to inquire after truth; it belongs to a greater power to possess it. It is not, as Democritus said, hid in the bottom of the deeps, but rather elevated to an infinite height in the divine knowledge."
"I moreover affirm that our wisdom itself, and wisest consultations, for the most part commit themselves to the conduct of chance."
"What if he has borrowed the matter and spoiled the form, as it oft falls out?"
"The oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried."
"Not because Socrates said so,… I look upon all men as my compatriots."
"My appetite comes to me while eating."
"There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life."
"Saturninus said, "Comrades, you have lost a good captain to make him an ill general.""
"A little folly is desirable in him that will not be guilty of stupidity."
"Habit is a second nature."
"We seek and offer ourselves to be gulled."
"I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself."
"Men are most apt to believe what they least understand."
"I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them together."
"Amongst so many borrowed things, I am glad if I can steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service."
"I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have."
"For truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times and in all sorts."
"The diversity of physical arguments and opinions embraces all sorts of methods."
"I have ever loved to repose myself, whether sitting or lying, with my heels as high or higher than my head."
"I, who have so much and so universally adored this [greek], "excellent mediocrity," 32 of ancient times, and who have concluded the most moderate measure the most perfect, shall I pretend to an unreasonable and prodigious old age?"
"A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband."
"A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can"
"Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face."
"Ambition is not a vice of little people."
"An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity."
"Confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence."
"Courtesy is a science of the highest importance. It is, like grace and beauty in the body, which charm at first sight, and lead on to further intimacy and friendship, opening a door that we may derive instruction from the example of others, and at the same time enabling us to benefit them by our example, if there be anything in our character worthy of imitation."
"Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet— the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies."
"Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations."
"Don't discuss yourself, for you are bound to lose; if you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved."
"Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them."
"Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows."
"Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be."
"Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky."
"Hath God obliged himself not to exceed the bounds of our knowledge?"
"He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak."
"He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears."
"He who is not sure of his memory, should not undertake the trade of lying."
"I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing."
"I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie."
"I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of."
"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly."
"If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it."
"In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word."
"In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page-boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk— they are all part of the curriculum."
"It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others."
"It is not death, it is dying that alarms me."
"It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor."
"It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity."
"Labour not after riches first, and think thou afterwards wilt enjoy them. He who neglecteth the present moment, throweth away all that he hath. As the arrow passeth through the heart, while the warrior knew not that it was coming; so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it."
"Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream."
"Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages."
"Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out."
"Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance."
"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened."
"No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately."
"No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port."
"Not being able to govern events, I govern myself."
"Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget."
"Observe, observe perpetually."
"Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being."
"Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul."
"Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee."
"So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination. ..And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do no bring forth in the agitation."
"Book I, Ch. 8"
"The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure."
"The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death."
"The entire lower world was created in the likeness of the higher world. All that exists in the higher world appears like an image in this lower world; yet all this is but One."
"The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like that in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene."
"The most profound joy has more of gravity than of gaiety in it."
"The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage."
"The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will."
"The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom."
"The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing."
"The world is but a perpetual see-saw."
"The worst of my actions or conditions seem not so ugly unto me as I find it both ugly and base not to dare to avouch for them."
"There is a plague on Man, the opinion that he knows something."
"There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves."
"There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom."
"There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees."
"There is no passion so contagious as that of fear."
"There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to."
"There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent."
"Those that will combat use and custom by the strict rules of grammar do but jest."
"'Tis the sharpness of our mind that gives the edge to our pains and pleasures."
"Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul."
"We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom."
"We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void."
"When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind."
"Who does not in some sort live to others, does not live much to himself."
"Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, research is the means of all learning, and ignorance is the end."
"Writing does not cause misery. It is born of misery."
"Montaigne speaks of an “Abecedarian” ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it. The first is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their A-B-C’s, cannot read at all. The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books."
"From now on, Montaigne would live for himself rather than for duty."
"He felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realizing his ordinariness made him extraordinary."
"The hedonistic approach to education did make a difference to him. Having been guided early in life by his own curiosity alone, he grew up to be an independent-minded adult, following his own path in everything rather than deferring to duty and discipline."
"The most offensive egotist is he that fears to say "I" and "me." "It will probably rain "—that is dogmatic. "I think it will rain"—that is natural and modest. Montaigne is the most delightful of essayists because so great is his humility that he does not think it important that we see not Montaigne. He so forgets himself that he employs no artifice to make us forget him."
"Montaigne is one of those perennial sources of mental health to which there needs no excuse for returning. He is always necessary and always being rediscovered."
"Montaigne the I-sayer. “I” as space, not as position."
"Europeans had often thought that somewhere in the world must dwell a noble race, remnants of that golden age before man became corrupted by civilization. As reports of Indians filtered back to Europe... Michelle de Montaigne took the trouble to talk with explorers, to read the traveler's chronicles, and even to meet three Indians who had been brought as curiosities to the Court of Versailles. He concluded that the Noble Savage has at last been found, for the Indian "hath... no name of magistrate, nor of politics... no contracts... no apparel but natural... The very words that import a lie, falsehood, treason, covetousness, envy, detraction, were not heard among them." Montaigne presented an idealized notion about the aborigines ...that foreshadowed the Noble Savage of Jean Jacques Rousseau."
"This great French writer deserves to be regarded as a classic, not only in the land of his birth, but in all countries and in all literatures. His Essays, which are at once the most celebrated and the most permanent of his productions, form a magazine out of which such minds as those of Bacon and Shakespeare did not disdain to help themselves; and, indeed, as Hallam observes, the Frenchman’s literary importance largely results from the share which his mind had in influencing other minds, coeval and subsequent. But, at the same time, estimating the value and rank of the essayist, we are not to leave out of the account the drawbacks and the circumstances of the period: the imperfect state of education, the comparative scarcity of books, and the limited opportunities of intellectual intercourse. Montaigne freely borrowed of others, and he has found men willing to borrow of him as freely. We need not wonder at the reputation which he with seeming facility achieved. He was, without being aware of it, the leader of a new school in letters and morals. His book was different from all others which were at that date in the world. It diverted the ancient currents of thought into new channels. It told its readers, with unexampled frankness, what its writer’s opinion was about men and things, and threw what must have been a strange kind of new light on many matters but darkly understood. Above all, the essayist uncased himself, and made his intellectual and physical organism public property. He took the world into his confidence on all subjects. His essays were a sort of literary anatomy, where we get a diagnosis of the writer’s mind, made by himself at different levels and under a large variety of operating influences"
"Of all egotists, Montaigne, if not the greatest, was the most fascinating, because, perhaps, he was the least affected and most truthful. What he did, and what he had professed to do, was to dissect his mind, and show us, as best he could, how it was made, and what relation it bore to external objects. He investigated his mental structure as a schoolboy pulls his watch to pieces, to examine the mechanism of the works; and the result, accompanied by illustrations abounding with originality and force, he delivered to his fellow-men in a book. Eloquence, rhetorical effect, poetry, were alike remote from his design. He did not write from necessity, scarcely perhaps for fame. But he desired to leave France, nay, and the world, something to be remembered by, something which should tell what kind of a man he was — what he felt, thought, suffered — and he succeeded immeasurably, I apprehend, beyond his expectations. It was reasonable enough that Montaigne should expect for his work a certain share of celebrity in Gascony, and even, as time went on, throughout France; but it is scarcely probable that he foresaw how his renown was to become world-wide; how he was to occupy an almost unique position as a man of letters and a moralist; how the Essays would be read, in all the principal languages of Europe, by millions of intelligent human beings, who never heard of Perigord or the League, and who are in doubt, if they are questioned, whether the author lived in the sixteenth or the eighteenth century. This is true fame. A man of genius belongs to no period and no country. He speaks the language of nature, which is always everywhere the same."
"Mr. Sensible learned only catchwords from them. He could talk like Epicurus of spare diet, but he was a glutton. He had from Montaigne the language of friendship, but no friend."
"Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence."
"The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life."
"Sixteen years of observing himself and reading and rereading the thousand books in the round library had convinced him not only that life was all there is but that "Each man bears the entire form of man's estate.""
"What the earliest utopians — Montaigne, Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella — understood was that they fought not for a place but for a new set of ideas through which to recognize what would count as Real: Equality, not hierarchical authority. Individual dignity, not slavish subservience. Our preeminent problem is that we recognize the Real in what is most deadly: a culture of duty to legalities that are, finally, cruel and destructive. We need to work inventively — as Christ did, as Thoreau did — in the spirit of disobedience for the purpose of refusing the social order into which we happen to have been born and putting in its place a culture of life-giving things."
"Quels que soient les progrès des connaissances humaines, il y aura toujours place pour l'ignorance et par suite pour le hasard et la probabilité."
"Concevons qu’on ait dressé un million de singes à frapper au hasard sur les touches d’une machine à écrire et que, sous la surveillance de contremaîtres illettrés, ces singes dactylographes travaillent avec ardeur dix heures par jour avec un million de machines à écrire de types variés. Les contremaîtres illettrés rassembleraient les feuilles noircies et les relieraient en volumes. Et au bout d’un an, ces volumes se trouveraient renfermer la copie exacte des livres de toute nature et de toutes langues conservés dans les plus riches bibliothèques du monde. Telle est la probabilité pour qu’il se produise pendant un instant très court, dans un espace de quelque étendue, un écart notable de ce que la mécanique statistique considère comme la phénomène le plus probable."
"Just as Borel, the pure mathematician interested in probability and statistics, had no counterpart in England so Keynes, the logician-economist, had no counterpart in France."
"Nous avons changé d’époque, la France doit vivre avec le terrorisme, mais nous ne céderons pas à la menace terroriste, nous devons faire bloc, être solidaires. La France a été une nouvelle fois frappée dans sa chair"
"Salafism, which has destroyed and perverted a part of the Muslim world, is a threat for Muslims, and also a danger for France."
"There is no definition of cults in law. on the other hand, these organizations know perfectly evade justice by hiding their true nature, since you are aware that freedom of conscience in France is a fundamental freedom enshrined in all our principles and our texts."
"I say also: watch (…) to any signs that would suggest that there a disempowerment. That those who plunge into Salafism are somehow victims of a great handling as regards sects. No, there is also that part of personal will that you should never rule out."
"It time to declare Salafism outlawed. As sectarian drift, or as affecting the fundamental interests of the Nation, choose the safest way."
"I don't mind London being so attractive to the French, but what I don't want is for there to be a widening gap between the two where London is attractive and Paris less so. I want it to be self-evident that Paris is the place to be. If you leave for a professional opportunity, that is understandable, but to leave because you have the impression you can't succeed where you are, can't live in your life, that's a different matter."
"I have always got on well with Rachida, She's someone who has all sorts of qualities, an incredible energy, an important presence. She leaves no one indifferent."
"I don't buy the prevailing theory that capitals are becoming increasingly Left-wing, they are in full globalisation and reconstruction mode, with huge tectonic shifts, a fusion of cultures. Whoever has the vision and personality to run such world cities is the right person. It's less about the political card you carry."
"You have to decide whether you want to take part in politics or not. We're a republic, not a monarchy, and the partner should be like in Germany, where Angela Merkel's companion is rarely mentioned."
"Have you ever tried to take the metro with a pushchair? I have two small boys. It's a nightmare, you can't replace that with a vélib [Mr Delanoë's bike rental scheme]. Lots of middle-class families with children are obliged to leave, due to economic and housing issues. The Left denies it, but more and more are going out to the suburbs."
"My only fight is for Paris."
"That Hindu astronomical lore about ancient times cannot be based on later back-calculation, was also argued by Playfair’s contemporary, the French astronomer jean-Sylvain Bailly: “The motions of the stars calculated by the Hindus before some 4500 years vary not even a single minute from the [modem] tables of Cassini and Meyer. The Indian tables give the same annual variation of the moon as that discovered by Tycho Brahe - a variation unknown to the school of Alexandria and also the Arabs.”"
"The Hindu systems of astronomy are by far the oldest, and that from which the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and even the Jews derived Hindus their knowledge."
"The motion of the stars calculated by the Hindus some 4500 years before vary not even a single minute from the modern tables of Cassini and Meyer."
"Even before Jones's announcement, Bailly stated that "the Brahmans are the teachers of Pythagoras, the instructors of Greece and through her of the whole of Europe" (51)."
"The astronomer and onetime mayor of Paris, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, in his Histoire de I'astronomie ancienne et moderne (1805), felt that "these tables of the Brahmana are perhaps five or six thousand years old" (53;). Bailly approved of the traditional date of the Kali Yuga, and seemed to have convinced at least some of his colleagues such as Laplace and Playfair of the accuracy of the Indian astronomical claims (Kay, [1924] 1981, 2). This was bitterly opposed by another astronomer, John Bentley ([1825] 1981), with a concern that we have seen was typical for the times: "If we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, as he would wish us, then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction" (xxvii)."
"These observations must therefore have been made elsewhere, and one can hardly refuse to believe that they were made in India where the Chaldeans seem to have borrowed the first elements of their Astronomy."
"‘It follows, therefore, that the astronomers of Alexandria take from the Indians the primitive and fundamental knowledge of the theory of the moon.’"
"‘Mons. Bailly, the celebrated author of the History of Astronomy, may be regarded as beginning the concert of praises, upon this branch of the science of the Hindus. The grounds of his conclusions were certain astronomical tables; from which he inferred, not only advanced progress in the science, but a date so ancient as to be entirely inconsistent with the chronology of the Hebrew Scriptures. [...] Another cause of great distrust attaches to Mons. Bailly, Voltaire, and other excellent writers in France, abhorring the evils which they saw attached to catholicism, laboured to subvert the authority of the books on which it was founded. Under this impulse, they embraced [...] the tales respecting the great antiquity of the Chinese and Hindus as disproving, entirely, the Mosaic accounts of the duration of the present race of men. [...] The argument [...] by Mons. Bailly, was [...] for a time regarded as a demonstration in form of the falsehood of Christianity.’"
"If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism."
"Two hundred families are masters of the French economy and, in fact, of French politics. They constitute a force which a democratic state should not tolerate, which Richelieu would not have tolerated in the kingdom of France. The influence of the two hundred families weighs heavily on the fiscal system, on transportation, on credit. The two hundred families place their delegates in the seats of power. They operate on public opinion, for they control the press."
"This pattern of Anglo-French mal-coordination, not helped by the divergence of domestic politics in the two countries when France briefly had a Popular Front government, was to continue until the outbreak of war. Even after the Anschluss, Chamberlain could not bring himself to utter more than the most ambiguous hint of support for France in the event of a continental war. Unfortunately, there was just as much ambiguity in the French position after Edouard Daladier became Prime Minister in April 1938, not least because of the habitual cowardice of Georges Bonnet, his Foreign Minister. In Asia, meanwhile, Britain simply could not choose between her interests in China and the need to avoid war with Japan. The British nightmare was a German-Italian-Japanese combination. Yet the more they sought to avert it by diplomatic expedients rather than military countermeasures, the more likely it became."
"Unlike the French government, Britain had no formal obligations to Czechoslovakia. A cardinal axiom of British foreign policy was not to get entangled in France’s alliance system in Eastern Europe, designed to threaten a resurgent Germany with war on two fronts. However, the French coalition government led by Édouard Daladier was itself bitterly split over Czechoslovakia, with one group willing to honor France’s obligations, another favoring peace at almost any price, and Daladier shifting uneasily between them. At root, a weakened and divided France would not go to war without Britain: for much of the Czech crisis, Paris therefore followed London—its “English governess,” in the words of one historian. And London, in essence, meant Neville Chamberlain, aged sixty-eight, who had succeeded Stanley Baldwin as prime minister in May 1937."
"Violence and intimidation against our elected representatives are a red line in our democracy."