Academics From France

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

"[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."

"[T]oute vérité démontrée est nécessaire, eternelle et immuable."

"[I]l n'y a rien de pire que l'anarchie, c'est-a-dire de vivre sans gouvernement et sans lois."

"Le fruit de la démonstration est la science."

"Le plus grand dérèglement de l'esprit, c'est de croire les choses parce qu'on veut qu'elles soient et non parce qu'on a vu qu'elles sont en effet."

"Only great souls know the grandeur there is in charity."

"Ainsi il appartient à l'esprit , c'est-a-dire à l'intendement, de juger de la beauté; parce que juger de la beauté, c'est juger de l'ordre, de la proportion et de la justesse; choses que l'esprit seul peut apercevoir."

"Un homme ne veut point croire qu'il soit orgueilleux, ni lâche, ni paresseux, ni emporté; il veut croire que qu'il a raison; et quoique su conscience lui reproche souvent ses fautes, il aime mieux étordir lui-même le sentiment qu'il en a, que d'avoir le chagrin de les connaître."

"[L]'imagination aide beaucoup l'intelligence."

"[C]et inexorable ennui, qui fait le fond de la vie humaine depui que l'homme a perdu le goût de Dieu!"

"L'hérétique est celui qui ha une opinion; et c'est ce que le mot même signifie. Quest-ce a dire, avoir une opinion? C'est suivre sa propre pensée et son sentiment particulier. Mais le Catholique est catholique: c'est-a-dire qu'il est universel; et sans avoir de sentiment particulier, il suit sans hèsiter celui de l'Eglise."

"[L]es hérésies n'ont jamais été que des opinions particulières, puisqu'elles ont commencé par cinq ou six hommes."

"[L]a felicité de l'homme consiste a vivre selon la raison."

"Honor is like the eye, which cannot suffer the least impurity without damage. It is a precious stone, the price of which is lessened by a single flaw."

"Il n'y a donc rien de meilleur, pour ben juger des animaux, que d'étudier soi-même auparavant. Car encore que nous ayons quelque chose au-dessus de l'animal, nous sommes animaux, et nous avons l'expérience tant de ce que fait en nous l'animal que de ce qu'y fait le raisonnement et la réflexion."

"La foi est une adhérence du cœur à la vérité éternelle."

"Nature, or to speak in more Christian fashion, God, the common Father of men, from the outset gave equal rights to all his children to all the things they needed to preserve their lives. None of us can boast of being more privileged than the rest by nature; but through the insatiable desire to amass wealth, it became impossible for this beautiful brotherhood to endure for long in the world. Men had to resort to division and possession, which resulted in constant quarrels and litigation; of this were born the words 'mine' and 'thine'—such cold terms, as the admirable St. John Chrysostom remarks—of this, too, was born the great diversity of conditions, some living in affluence in every respect, others languishing in penury."

"Il faut aller jusqu'á l'horreur quand on se connaît."

"[L]e monde même vous désabuse du monde."

"The Western misreading of the Soviet system was largely the product of a simple reflex. ... Whatever its doubtless temporary — or invented — faults (so the thinking went), the Soviet ideology stood for a better world. ... [E]ven Romain Rolland, the sensitive follower of Gandhi, spoke out in defense of the purges."

"That I have been allowed to exchange a greeting with you will remain a happy memory to the end of my days."

"No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself. And the most objective books are the most deceptive. The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest."

"Goethe and Romain Rolland paint psychological landscapes, depicting both characters and spiritual conditions, but the Japanese-Flaubertian analytical tanka is a form alien to them."

"Of course, this entire fabric of Indian life stands solidly on faith, that is to say, on a slender and emotional hypothesis. But amid all the beliefs of Europe, and of Asia, that of the Indian Brahmins seems to me infinitely the most alluring. And the reason why I love the Brahmin more than the other schools of Asiatic thought is because it seems to me to contain them all. Greater than all European philosophies, it is even capable of adjusting itself to the vast hypotheses of modern science. Our Christian religions have tried in vain, when there were no other choice open to them, to adapt themselves to the progress of science. But after having allowed myself to be swept away by the powerful rhythm of Brahmin thought, along the curve of life, with its movement of alternating ascent and return, I come back to my own century, and while finding therein the immense projections of a new cosmogony, offspring of the genius of Einstein, or deriving freely from the discoveries, I yet do not feel that I enter a strange land. I yet can hear resounding still the cosmic symphony of all those planets which forever succeed each other, are extinguished and once more illumined, with their living souls, their humanities, their gods – according to the laws of the eternal To Become, the Brahmin Samsara – I hear Siva dancing, dancing in the heart of the world, in my own heart."

"In the great philosophy of Brahma, such violent turns of the scale are quite unknown. It embraces vast stretches of time, cycles of human ages, whose successive lives gravitate in concentric circles, and travel ever slowly towards the center."

"Never do I hesitate to look squarely at the unexpected face that every passing hour unveils to us, and to sacrifice the false images of it formed in advance, however dear they may be. In me, the love of life in general predominates over love of my own life (that, indeed, would never have sufficed to bear me up). May life herself speak! However inadequate I may be in listening to her, and in repeating her words, I shall try to record them, even if they contradict my most secret desires. In all that I write, may her will, not mine, be done!"

"Religious faith in the case of the Hindus has never been allowed to run counter to scientific laws, moreover the former is never made a condition for the knowledge they teach, but there are always scrupulously careful to take into consideration the possibility that by reason both the agnostic and atheist may attain truth in their own way. Such tolerance may be surprising to religious believers in the West, but it is an integral part of Vedantic belief."

"The true Vedantic spirit does not start out with a system of preconceived ideas. It possesses absolute liberty and unrivalled courage among religions with regard to the facts to be observed and the diverse hypotheses it has laid down for their coordination. Never having been hampered by a priestly order, each man has been entirely free to search wherever he pleased for the spiritual explanation of the spectacle of the universe."

"Let us return to our eagle's nest in the Himalayas. It is waiting for us, for it is ours, eaglets of Europe, we need not renounce any part of our real nature...whence we formerly took our flight."

"The greatest human ideal is the great cause of bringing together the thoughts of Europe and Asia; the great soul of India will topple our world."

"A hundred facts testify to how great an extent the East was mingled with Hellenic thought during the second century of our era."

"The vast and tranquil metaphysics of India is unfolded; her conception of the universe, her social organization, perfect in its day and still capable of adaptation to the demands of modern times; the solution which she offers for the feminist problem, for the problems of the family, of love, of marriage; and lastly, the magnificent revelation of her art. The whole vast soul of India proclaims from end to end of its crowded and well ordered edifice the same domination of a sovereign synthesis." There is no negation. All is harmonized. All the forces of life are grouped like a forest, whose thousand waving arms are led by Nataraja, the master of the Dance. Everything has its place, every being has its function, and all take part in the divine concert, their different voices, and their very dissonances, creating, in the phrase of Heraclitus, a most beautiful harmony. Whereas in the West, cold, hard logic isolates the unusual, shutting it off from the rest of life into a definite and distinct compartment of the spirit. India, ever mindful of the natural differences in souls and in philosophies, endeavors to blend them into each other, so as to recreate in its fullest perfection the complete unity. The matching of opposites produces the true rhythm of life."

"If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India. ... For more than 30 centuries, the tree of vision, with all its thousand branches and their millions of twigs, has sprung from this torrid land, the burning womb of the Gods. It renews itself tirelessly showing no signs of decay."

"Are you descendants of Goethe or of Attila the Hun?"

"What I especially love in Lefebvre is this intimate alliance — which for me makes the true man — of pessimism of the intelligence, which penetrates every illusion, and optimism of the will."

"I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so."

"In politics, he has always been a republican with advanced Socialist sympathies, and internationalist at heart, and, as they said in the eighteenth century, a "citizen of the world." He has always fought social injustice. In art, he loves, above all, Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Goethe...Rembrandt is the painter dearest to him. But his chosen country is Italy."

"There has always been an element of the magical in the style of M. Ernest Renan—an art of saying things in a way to make them beautiful."

"Theatre supposes lives that are poor and agitated, a people searching in dreams for a refuge from thought. If we were happier and freer we should not feel hungry for theatre. ... A people that is happy and free has need of festivities more than of theatres; it will always see in itself the finest spectacle."

"One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved."

"There is only one necessary condition for the emergence of a new theatre, that the stage and auditorium should be open to the masses, should be able to contain a people and the actions of a people."

"Nature, on the other hand, plays a very small role in the Semitic religions: the desert is monotheistic; sublime in its immense uniformity, it primarily revealed to man the idea of 'infinite.'"

"Thus, the Semitic race is recognizable almost solely through negative characteristics: it has neither mythology, nor epic, nor science, nor philosophy, nor fiction, nor plastic arts, nor civil life; in sum an absence of complexity, of nuance, an exclusive sentiment of unity."

"The true Semitic society is that of the tent and of the tribe."

"No place in the world has had a comparable role to that of the nameless mountain or valley where mankind first attained self-consciousness. Let us be proud ... of the old patriarchs who, at the foot of Imaiis, laid the foundations of what we are and of what we shall become."

"A famous student of history has bequeathed to us a definition of nationality which is worth attention: I refer to Ernest Renan, of whom George Meredith once said to me, while the great French critic was still living, that there was more in his head than in any other head in Europe. Renan tells us that "Man is enslaved neither by his race, nor by his language, nor by his religion, nor by the course of rivers, nor by the direction of mountain ranges. A great aggregation of men, sane of mind and warm of heart, creates a moral consciousness which is called a nation.""

"Religious faith in the case of Hindus has never been allowed to run counter to scientific laws; moreover the former is never made a condition for the knowledge they teach, but they are always scrupulously careful to take into consideration the possibility that by reason both the agnostic and atheist may attain truth in their own ways."

"La nature a fait une race d'ouvriers ; c'est la race chinoise, d'une dextérité de main merveilleuse sans presque aucun sentiment d'honneur; gouvernez-la avec justice , en prélevant d'elle pour le bienfait d'un tel gouvernement un ample douaire au profit de la race conquérante, elle sera satisfaite ; une race de travailleurs de la terre, c'est le nègre ; soyez pour lui bon et humain, et tout sera dans l'ordre; -- une race de maîtres et de soldats, c'est la race européenne ."

"I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life."