Academics From France

"The more I see of the representatives of the people, the more I admire my dogs."

"What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?"

"Let us love the passing hour, let us hurry up and enjoy our time."

"Love alone was left, as a great image of a dream that was erased."

"Si la grandeur du dessein, la petitesse des moyens, l'immensité du résultat sont les trois mesures du génie de l'homme, qui osera comparer humainement un grand homme de l'histoire moderne à Mahomet?"

"Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens."

"Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated."

"O time, arrest your flight! and you, propitious hours, arrest your course! Let us savor the fleeting delights of our most beautiful days!"

"Never has a man set for himself, voluntarily or involuntarily, a more sublime aim, since this aim was super human; to subvert superstitions which had been imposed between man and his Creator, to render God unto man and man unto God; to restore the rational and sacred idea of divinity amidst the chaos of the material and disfigured gods of idolatry, then existing. Never has a man undertaken a work so far beyond human power with so feeble means, for he Muhammad had in the conception as well as in the execution of such a great design, no other instrument than himself and no other aid except a handful of men living in a corner of the desert. Finally, never has a man accomplished such a huge and lasting revolution in the world, because in less than two centuries after its appearance, Islam, reigned over the whole of Arabia, and conquered, in God's name, Persia, Khorasan, Transoxania, Western India, Syria, Egypt, Abyssinia, all the known continent of Northern Africa, numerous islands of the Mediterranean Sea, Spain and part of Gaul. If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astounding results are the three criteria of human genius, who could dare to compare any great man in modern history with Muhammad? The most famous men created arms, laws and empires only. They founded, if anything at all, no more than material powers which often crumbled away before their eyes. This man moved not only armies, legislations, empires, peoples and dynasties, but millions of men in one-third of the then inhabited world; and more than that, he moved the altars, the gods, the religions, the ideas, the beliefs and souls. . . his forbearance in victory, his ambition, which was entirely devoted to one idea and in no manner striving for an empire; his endless prayers, his mystic conversations with God, his death and his triumph after death; all these attest not to an imposture but to a firm conviction which gave him the power to restore a dogma. This dogma was twofold, the unity of God and the immateriality of God; the former telling what God is, the latter telling what God is not; the one overthrowing false gods with the sword, the other starting an idea with words. Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images; the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire, that is Muhammad. As regards all standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask, is there any man greater than he?"

"I say to this night: "Pass more slowly"; and the dawn will come to dispel the night."

"Silence is the winding-sheet of the past: it is sometimes impious, often dangerous to raise it. But even when it is raised piously and lovingly, the first moment is a cruel one."

"Derrière un voile, invisible et présente, J'étais de ce grand corps l'âme toute-puissante."

"Je l'ai trop aimé pour ne le point haïr!"

"Dieu des Juifs, tu l'emportes!"

"Hâtons-nous aujourd'hui de jouir de la vie. Qui sait si nous serons demain?"

"Pour réparer des ans l'irréparable outrage."

"Aux petits des oiseaux il donne leur pâture, Et sa bonté s’étend sur toute la nature."

"Ariane, ma sœur, de quel amour blessée,Vous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée."

"C'est toi qui l'as nommé."

"Ce n'est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachée: C'est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée."

"Tout m'afflige et me nuit, et conspire à me nuire."

"Mon unique espérance est dans mon désespoir."

"Jamais on ne vaincra les Romains que dans Rome."

"L'innocence enfin n'a rien à redouter."

"Un bienfait reproché tient toujours lieu d’offense."

"Ce que je sais le mieux, c'est mon commencement."

"Ainsi que la vertu, le crime a ses dégrés; Et jamais on n'a vu la timide innocence Passer subitement à l'extrême licence."

"Vous êtes empereur, Seigneur, et vous pleurez!"

"Je ne puis;—malgré moi l'infini me tourmente."

"The apartments of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: a conglomeration of classical antiquity, gothic, renaissance; Louis XIII... Something from every century but our own, a predicament that has arisen in no other period... so that we seem to be subsisting on the ruins of the past, as if the end of the world were near."

"For us, a sorrowful generation consumed by visions and insulted by his angelic sloth, Musset is fourteen times worse! O the tedious tales and proverbs! O his Nuits! His Rolla, Namouna, La Coupe. It’s all so French, which is to say unbearable to the nth degree; French, but not Parisian. Another work by that odious genius who inspired Rabelais, Voltaire and Jean La Fontaine, with notes by M. Taine! How vernal, Musset’s mind! And how delightful, his love! Like paint on enamel, his dense poetry! We will savor French poetry endlessly, in France. Every grocer’s son can reel off something Rollaesque, every seminarian has five hundred rhymes hidden in his notebook. At fifteen, these passionate impulses give boys boners; at sixteen, they’ve already resolved to recite their lines with feeling; at eighteen, even seventeen, every schoolboy who can write a Rolla, does—and they all do! Some may even still die from it. Musset couldn’t do anything: there were visions behind the gauze curtains: he closed his eyes. French, half-dead, dragged from tavern to schooldesk, the beautiful corpse has died, and, ever since, we needn’t waste our time trying to rouse him with our abominations!"

"As all the perfumes of the vanished day Rise from the earth still moistened with the dew So from my chastened soul beneath thy ray Old love is born anew."

"Great artists have no country."

"India survived only by virtue of its patience, its superhuman power and its immense size. The levies it had to pay were so crushing that one catastrophic harvest was enough to unleash famines and epidemics capable of killing a million people at a time. Appalling poverty was the constant counterpart of the conquerors’ opulence. … The Muslims … could not rule the country except by systematic terror. Cruelty was the norm burnings, summary executions, crucifixions or impalements, inventive tortures. Hindu temples were destroyed to make way for mosques. On occasion there were forced conversions. If ever there were an uprising, it was instantly and savagely repressed: houses were burned, the countryside was laid waste, men were slaughtered and women were taken as slaves."

"Braudel was not a Hindu chauvinist, just a scholarly observer, but in today’s climate, he would be blacklisted."

"Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history."

"[T]he entire course of French history since then has been influenced by something that happened in the eighteenth century” and asks “did France cease to be a great power not, as is usually thought, on 15 June 1815 on the field of Waterloo, but well before that, during the reign of Louis XV when the natural birth-rate was interrupted?"

"For four or five centuries, Islam was the most brilliant civilization in the Old World. ... At its higher level the golden age of Muslim civilization was both an immense scientific success and a exceptional revival of ancient philosophy. These was not its only triumphs; literature was another: but they eclipse the rest. First, science: it was there that the Saracens ... made the most original contributions. These, in brief, were nothing less than trigonometry and algebra (with its significantly Arab name). ... Equally distinguished were Islam's mathematical geographers, its astronomical observatories and instruments ... [.] The Muslims also deserve high marks for optics, for chemistry ... and for pharmacy. More than half the remedies and healing aids used by the West came from Islam ... [.] Muslim medical skill was incontestable. ... In the field of philosophy, what took place was rediscovery - a return, essentially of the peripatetic philosophy. The scope of this rediscovery, however, was not limited to copying and handling on, valuable as that undoubtely was. It also involved continuing, elucidating and creating."

"[L]a perfection est la raison d'être."

"Dieu est celui en qui le non-être n'a pas de lieu."

"La sagesse humaine apprend beaucoup, si elle apprend à se taire."

"Au milieu des déguisements et des artifices qui règnent parmi les hommes, il n'y a que l'attention et la vigilance qui nous puissent sauver des surprises."

"[D]éisme, c-est-à-dire […] un athéisme déguisé."

"Le premier de tous les empires est celui qu'on a sur ses désirs."

"Bossuet was a man you instinctively approached on all fours."

"C'est le plus grande de toutes les faiblesses, que de craindre trop rie paraître faible."

"[L]e destinée ordinaire de ceux qui refusent de prêter l'oreille à la vérité est d'être entraînés à leur perte par des prophètes menteurs."

"Les uns alléguant toujours que la liberté excessive se détruit enfin elle-même; et les autres craignant au contraire que l'autorité, que de sa nature croît toujours, ne dégénérât enfin en tyrannie."

"Le propre de l'hérétique, c'est-à-dire de colui qui a une opinion particulière, est de s'attacher à ses propres pensées; et le propre du catholique, c'est-à-dire de l'universel, est de préférer à ses sentiments le sentiment commun de tout l'Eglise."

"Ne croyons pas que notre âme sait une portion de la nature divine, comme l'ont revé quelques philosophes. Dieu n'est pas un tout qui se partage."