"There is no trace of bitterness in his poetry; one would almost say, there is no indignation before the evils of the world. Of course there is a reaction of indignation in the mind of the reader. La Fontaine knows very well that the reader will be on the side of the lamb against the wolf: there is no need for him to express his own indignation and he never does. In this he differs from those moralists who wrote—and at times magnificently—what one could call ‘la littérature de l’indignation’; in the works of the English moralists, Pope and Swift, and of La Bruyère also, we can perceive the controlled reactions of their wounded sensibility, their revolt against unfairness and cruelty and a burning hankering after some sort of justice. La Fontaine's attitude is that of detachment."

"L'homme est ainsi bâti: Quand un sujet l'enflamme L'impossibilité disparaît à son âme."

"On rencontre sa destinée Souvent par des chemins qu’on prend pour l’éviter."

"Laissez dire les sots: le savoir a son prix."

"Rien n'est si dangereux qu'un ignorant ami; Mieux vaudrait un sage ennemi."

"The Fables belong to comedy; the pure comic vision, different in that respect from that noble hybrid, satire, requires that the reader should appreciate it intellectually without being emotionally involved. In La Fontaine, as in Molière, the detachment of the comic vision prevents the tragic element from making its impact on the reader directly, although the upsetting implications are there. The device of using animals as protagonists makes it easier to assume this attitude of detachment: while we watch the adventures of the animal, although they are our own adventures, we benefit from our ordinary feeling of superiority over the animals; and this feeling of being superior and of being different, which we automatically have, helps us to watch the tragedy of the world from the point of view of the gods."

"La mort ne surprend point le sage: Il est toujours prêt à partir."

"Rien ne pèse tant qu'un secret."

"Les gens sans bruit sont dangereux."

"Plus fait douceur que violence."

"Garde-toi, tant que tu vivras, De juger les gens sur la mine."

"Rien ne sert de courir; il faut partir à point."

"De la peau du lion l'âne s'étant vêtu, Était craint partout à la ronde."

"Il n'est rien d'inutile aux personnes de sens."

"Il ne faut jamais Vendre la peau de l'ours qu'on ne l'ait mis par terre."

"Aide-toi, le ciel t'aidera."

"Bref, la fortune a toujours tort."

"En toute chose il faut considérer la fin."

"Amour est un étrange maître! Heureux qui peut ne le connaître Que par récit, lui ni ses coups!"

"[On] est bien fou de cerveau Qui prétend contenter tout le monde et son père."

"Sur les ailes du Temps la tristesse s'envole."

"Patience et longueur de temps Font plus que force ni que rage."

"C'est double plaisir de tromper le trompeur."

"... ’argent vient-il comme il s’en va ? Je n’y touchois jamais. Dites-moy donc de grace, Reprit l’autre, pourquoy vous vous affligez tant, Puiſque vous ne touchiez jamais à cet argent : Mettez une pierre à la place, Elle vous vaudra tout autant."

"Il faut, autant qu'on peut, obliger tout le monde: On a souvent besoin d'un plus petit que soi."

"Plutôt souffrir que mourir, C'est la devise des hommes."

"A l'oeuvre on connaît l'artisan."

"La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure."

"Apprenez que tout flatteur Vit aux dépens de celui qui l'écoute."

"Nous n'écoutons d'instincts que ceux qui sont les nôtres, Et ne croyons le mal que quand il est venu."

"Je plie, et ne romps pas."

"La fourmi n'est pas prêteuse; C'est là son moindre défaut."

"We then saw what St. Jerome said of those who serve God and those who serve the world: "Each to the other we seem insane": Invicem insanire videmur. There is a never-ending duel between the two."

"L'histoire, encore que mensongère, Contient des vérités qui servent de leçons. Tout parle en mon ouvrage, et même les poissons. Ce qu'ils disent s'adresse à tout tant que nous sommes; Je me sers d'animaux pour instruire les hommes."

"To live lightheartedly but not recklessly; to be gay without being boisterous; to be courageous without being bold; to show trust and cheerful resignation without fatalism — this is the art of living."

"Les délicats sont malheureux: Rien ne saurait les satisfaire."

"The fly of the coach."

"Everyone calls himself a friend, but only a fool relies on it; nothing is commoner than the name, nothing rarer than the thing."

"Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire."

"Je vais t'entretenir de moindres aventures, Te tracer en ces vers de légères peintures; Et si de t'agréer je n'emporte le prix, J'aurai du moins d'honneur de l'avoir entrepris."

"People must help one another; it is nature's law."

"L’enseigne fait la chalandise."

"One of the most fundamental principles of Lavoisier's chemistry was the use of numbers, notably in relation to what we often call today the principle of conservation of mass... The principle implies that the experimenter must not only keep account of all the reacting solids and liquids, but also the gases—that is, all of the products. ...This rule led to quantitative experiments. Lavoisier was not the first person to use numbers in chemistry but he was a pioneer in using such numerical measurements as the basis of his system of chemistry. ...When Lavoisier first announced this law, chemists generally believed in... "phlogiston" which supposedly entered into chemical reactions (such as combustion) but had no weight. It was a radical step, therefore, for Lavoisier to base a system of chemistry on a balance of weights and to maintain that chemistry is not concerned with weightless "substances." ...this was indeed a chemical revolution."

"In 1774 he [ Joseph Priestley ] thought he had obtained nitrous oxide... in 1775 he saw the gas as dephlogisticated air... If we refuse the palm to Priestley, we cannot award it to Lavoisier for the work of 1775... Lavoisier insisted that oxygen was an atomic "principle of acidity"… formed only when that "principle" united with "caloric"... Ignoring Scheele, we can safely say that oxygen had not been discovered before 1774, and we would probably say that it had been discovered by 1777 or shortly thereafter. But... any attempt to date the discovery must inevitably be arbitrary because discovering a new sort of phenomenon is necessarily a complex event, one which involves recognizing both that something is and what it is."

"Though Lavoisier generally gets credit for the authorship of this principle [ conservation of mass ], others had conceived it before him, The seventeenth century chemists, notably Helmont, Starkey, and Boyle, had a dawning awareness of the importance of weighing and measuring materials before and after an experimental process, though their methods and measurement devices were not so precise. In 1623, Francis Bacon declared, "..when they perceive that a body which was before manifest to the senses has escaped and disappeared, they should not admit or liquidate the account before it has been shown to them where the body has gone to and into what it has been received." And as early as 450 B.C., Anaxagoras argued, "Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that aught begins or ceases to be; for nothing comes into being or is destroyed; but all is an aggregation or secretion of preexisting things; so that all becoming might more correctly be called becoming mixed, and all corruption, becoming separate.""

"We may lay it down as an incontestible axiom, that, in all the operations of art and nature, nothing is created; an equal quantity of matter exists both before and after the experiment; the quality and quantity of the elements remain precisely the same; and nothing takes place beyond changes and modifications in the combination of these elements. Upon this principle the whole art of performing chemical experiments depends: We must always suppose an exact equality between the elements of the body examined and those of the products of its analysis."

"Now Mayow, like Boyle, conceived the air as made up of minute particles, while he restricted himself to two varieties, those, namely, which are necessary to life, called by him "spiritus igno-aereus," and those incapable of supporting respiration or combustion, which are left after the removal of this "spiritus." Since a mixture of saltpetre and sulphur continued burning even under water, he assumed that his igno-aereal particles must also be contained in the salt. Acids too contained the new principle. ...Mayow died in 1679 at the age of thirty-four years; had he lived but a little longer, it can scarcely be doubted that he would have forestalled the revolutionary work of Lavoisier, and stifled the theory of phlogiston at its birth. As it was, his work, though rendered in one of the most luminous and convincing scientific publications of the period, was immediately forgotten, and so proved of little effect on the evolution of our modern chemical system."