Poets From France

"The less one sees and knows men, the higher one esteems them; for experience teaches their real value."

"The virtuous action, done for virtue's sake alone, is truly laudable."

"We are always more disposed to laugh at nonsense than at genuine wit; because the nonsense is more agreeable to us, being more comformable to our own natures: fools love folly, and wise men wisdom."

"There are few husbands whom the wife can not win in the long run by patience and love, unless they are harder than the rocks which the soft water penetrates in time."

"There is no greater fool than he who thinks himself wise; no one wiser than he who suspects he is a fool."

"Mariage est un état de si longue durée, qu'il ne doit être commencé légèrement, ne sans l'opinion de nos meilleurs amis et parents."

"When one has one good day in the year, one is not wholly unfortunate."

"Blessed, unquestionably, is he who has it in his power to do evil, yet does it not."

"God always helps madmen, lovers, and drunkards."

"Un malheureux cherche l'autre."

"He who knows his own incapacity, knows something, after all."

"Man is wise ... when he recognises no greater enemy than himself."

"Though jealousy be produced by love as ashes are by fire, yet jealousy extinguishes love, as ashes smother the flame."

"No one ever perfectly loved God who did not perfectly love some of his creatures in this world."

"I never knew a mocker who was not mocked, ... a deceiver who was not deceived, or a proud man who was not humbled."

"I have heard much of these languishing lovers, but I never yet saw one of them die for love."

"To me it seems much better to love a woman as a woman, than to make her one's idol, as many do. For my part, I am convinced that it is better to use than to abuse."

"Ilz font semblant de n'aymer poinct les raisins quand ilz sont si haults, qu'ilz ne les peuvent cueillir."

"Men are so accustomed to lie, that one can not take too many precautions before trusting them — if they are to be trusted at all."

"There is in us more of the appearance of sense and of virtue than of the reality."

"Nul n'est content de sa fortune; Ni mécontent de son esprit."

"The worst thing is not to commit crimes but, rather, not to accomplish the good that one could have done. It is the sin of omission, which is nothing other than to be unloving, and no one accuses himself of it."

"Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig."

"There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint."

"The exercise of freedom consists in stripping oneself of one's own will."

"You are always on the right side when you are with those who suffer persecution and injustice."

"The rich have a horror of Poverty because they have a dim foreboding of the expiatory interchange implied by her presence."

"Tu seras invendable à perpétuité, l'Invendable, dans tes livres aussi bien que dans ta personne, et ainsi se réalisera tout à fait la séparation, naturellement désirée par toi, d'avec les vendeurs et les gens à vendre."

"Ah! The happy ones of this world who are assured their daily bread—that is, all the things necessary to bodily life—and who, not wishing to know Jesus, have never for one single instant had the idea of suffering for their brothers, of sacrificing themselves for the wretched: ah! indeed! such people are assuredly well qualified to judge me and to reproach me for not having what the world calls dignity!"

"Woe to him who has not begged! There is nothing more exalted than to beg. God begs. The Angels beg. Kings, Prophets, and Saints beg."

"Of the truths which embarrass him he thinks it better to remain unaware."

"My anger is the effervescence of my pity."

"Of course the avaricious man of our day, be he landlord, merchant, industrialist, does not adore sacks of coins or bundles of banknotes in some little chapel and upon some little altar. He does not kneel before these spoils of other men, nor does he address prayers or canticles to them amidst odorous clouds of incense. But he proclaims that money is the only good, and he yields it all his soul. A cult sincere, without hypocrisy, never growing weary, never forsworn. Whenever he says, in the debasement of his heart and his speech, that he loves money for the delights it can purchase, he lies or he terribly deceives himself, this very assertion being belied at the very moment he utters it by every one of his acts, by the infinite toil and pains to which he gladly condemns himself in order to acquire or conserve that money which is but the visible figure of the Blood of Christ circulating throughout all His members."

"The Bourgeois who has religious feelings sees very clearly the absolute necessity of serving two masters at the same time in order to achieve success in his business, which naturally comes before everything else."

"A perfectly true thought, expressed in very sound terms, can satisfy the reason without giving any impression of the Beautiful; but in that case certainly there is something false in its statement. It is essential that Truth be in Glory. Splendor of style is not a luxury. It is a necessity."

"Unhappy writer, you had dreamt of winning souls and you have won nothing but ears!"

"His violence was the obverse of a charity lashed by incomparable storms, which had reached the end of its patience."

"Instead of being a whited sepulchre like the Pharisees of all times, he was a charred blackened cathedral."

"Bloy ... believed that those who are wealthy and who keep their wealth for themselves even as the poor continue to suffer and perish, are in God's eyes the murderers of their brothers and sisters."

"Suffering passes, but the fact of having suffered never passes."

"It is the small flock of God. "Whoever receives in my name one of those little" said Jesus, "It is myself who receives." What thinks the one that sticks, that maims, or inflicts to their pure souls more black sorrow than death? (...) The curse of a crowd of children, is a cataclysm, a horror prodigy, a chain of dark mountains in the sky, with a cavalcade of thunder and lightning in their tops. It is the infinite of the cries of all deep, is a not know what highly powerful unforgiving and extinguishing any hope of forgiveness."

"Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength, but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it."

"I see from time to time coins that are tinted with red, having been handled by a butcher or a murderer, and the sight of that money makes me wonder. As I think about the probable origin of that sign of wealth, I tell myself that that is indeed its true color, the color which it should, which it must have, the color that was doubtless taken on by Judas’s pieces of silver, after which he ceased to recognize them and returned them at once to the egregious scoundrels who had given them to him. These, not recognizing the pieces themselves, did not want to return to the treasury of the Temple money so strange in its color. Everyone knows they used it to buy the field of blood, a generic name which I imagine can be applied to all bourgeois holdings ever since the Scourging and Crucifixion of Jesus Christ."

"Whoever does not pray to God, prays to the devil."

"One sees the world's evil accurately only by exaggerating it."

"My secret," he would say to me, "consists in loving with my whole soul, to the point of giving my life for them, the souls called to read me some day."

"You had hoped that the beloved and noble images flowing from your heart would serve as a river to carry to God many another heart! But, as you see, people are afraid of getting wet."

"Guyau places at the basis of his ethics the conception of life in the broadest sense of the word. Life manifests itself in growth, in multiplication, in spreading. Ethics, according to Guyau, should be a teaching about the means through which Nature's special aim is attained, -the growth and the development of life. The moral element in man needs, therefore, no coercion, no compulsory obligation, no sanction from above; it develops in us by virtue of the very need of man to live a full, intensive, productive life. Man is not content with ordinary, commonplace existence; he seeks the opportunity to extend its limits, to accelerate its tempo, to fill it with varied impressions and emotional experiences. And as long as he feels in himself the ability to attain this end he will not wait for any coercion or command from without. "Duty," says Guyau, is "the consciousness of a certain inward power, by nature superior to all other powers. To feel inwardly the greatest that one is capable of doing is really the first consciousness of what it is one's duty to do.""

"We can judge ourselves and our ideal by posing this question: For what idea, for what person would I be ready to risk my life? He who cannot answer such a question has a vulgar and empty heart. He is incapable of feeling or doing anything grand in life, since he is unable to go beyond his individuality. He is impotent and sterile, dragging along his selfish ego like the tortoise its shell. On the contrary, he who has present in his spirit the idea of death for his ideal seeks to maintain this ideal at the height of this possible sacrifice. He draws from this supreme risk a constant tension and an indefatigable energy of the will. The only means of being great in life is having the consciousness that you will not retreat before death."

"A child saw a butterfly poised on a blade of grass; the butterfly had been made numb by the north wind. The child plucked the blade of grass, and the living flower that was at its tip, still numb, remained attached. He returned home, holding his find in his hand. A ray of sunlight broke through, striking the butterfly’s wing, and suddenly, revived and light, the living flower flew away into the glare. All of us, scholars and workers, we are like the butterfly: our strength is made of a ray of light. Not even: of the hope of a ray. One must thus know how to hope; hope is what carries us higher and farther. “But it’s an illusion!” What do you know of this? Should we not take a step for fear that one day the earth will slide away from under our feet? Looking far into the past or the future is not the only thing; one must look into oneself. One must see there the living forces that demand to be expended, and we must act."