Playwrights From France

"If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him."

"What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your own days. You judge of the continuous existence of the world, as an ephemeral insect might judge of yours. The world is eternal for you, as you are eternal to the being that lives but for one instant. Yet the insect is the more reasonable of the two. For what a prodigious succession of ephemeral generations attests your eternity! What an immeasurable tradition! Yet shall we all pass away, without the possibility of assigning either the real extension that we filled in space, or the precise time that we shall have endured. Time, matter, space — all, it may be, are no more than a point."

"I don't understand how a man of good sense can accept for a single moment the sentence of the philosopher Diderot. It may well be high-sounding and incisive, it is nonetheless absurd and false. An who does not see, on the contrary, that it is not possible for the wicked man to love living alone and with himself? He would feel himself in company that is too bad, he would be too ill at ease, he would not be able to bear it for very long, or else, with his dominant passion remaining idle, it would have to die out and he would become good again. Amour-propre, the principle of all wickedness, is revived and thrives in society, which cause it to be born and where one is forced to compare oneself at each instant. It languishes and dies for want of nourishment in solitude. Whoever suffices to himself does not want to harm anyone at all. This maxim is less resounding and less arrogant, but more sensible and more just than that of the philosopher Diderot, and preferable at least in that it does not tend to offend anyone."

"Of course it would not do for the church to allow a man to die in peace who had added to the intellectual wealth of the world. The moment Diderot was dead, Catholic priests began painting and recounting the horrors of his expiring moments. They described him as overcome with remorse, as insane with fear; and these falsehoods have been repeated by the Protestant world, and will probably be repeated by thousands of ministers after we are dead. The truth is, he had passed his threescore years and ten. He had lived for seventy-one years. He had eaten his supper. He had been conversing with his wife. He was reclining in his easy chair. His mind was at perfect rest. He had entered, without knowing it, the twilight of his last day. Above the horizon was the evening star, telling of sleep. The room grew still and the stillness was lulled by the murmur of the street. There were a few moments of perfect peace. The wife said, "He is asleep." She enjoyed his repose, and breathed softly that he might not be disturbed. The moments wore on, and still he slept. Lovingly, softly, at last she touched him. Yes, he was asleep. He had become a part of the eternal silence."

"Diderot took the ground that, if orthodox religion be true Christ was guilty of suicide. Having the power to defend himself he should have used it."

"If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the "enthusiasm for truth and justice" — using this phrase in the good sense — it was Diderot."

"If I had believed him, everything would have been turned upside down... all would have been turned topsy-turvy to make room for impractical theories."

"Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully; and is good, self-possessed, has faith and is pure; and if he does not hurt any living being, he is a holy man."

"The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dicebox in hand, shaking the dice."

"There is only one passion, the passion for happiness."

"It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire."

"The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned."

"Good music is very close to primitive language."

"Gaiety — a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine."

"The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness for their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!"

"How easy it is to tell tales!"

"How did they meet? By chance, like everybody … Where did they come from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Do we know where we are going?"

"Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high."

"There is not a Musselman alive who would not imagine that he was performing an action pleasing to God and his Holy Prophet by exterminating every Christian on earth, while the Christians are scarcely more tolerant on their side."

"The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and … people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion."

"The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me."

"The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counterauthority to the law."

"The general interest of the masses might take the place of the insight of genius if it were allowed freedom of action."

"The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population."

"Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it."

"Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad."

"In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don't have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all."

"[L]e philosophe n'a jamais tué de prêtres et le prêtre a tué beaucoup de philosophes..."

"Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs."

"Égaré dans une forêt immense pendant la nuit, je n’ai qu’une petite lumière pour me conduire. Survient un inconnu qui me dit : Mon ami, souffle ta bougie pour mieux trouver ton chemin. Cet inconnu est un théologien. — No VIII"

"Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world. What is it, this egg, before the seed is introduced into it? An insentient mass. And after the seed has been introduced to into it? What is it then? An insentient mass. For what is the seed itself other than a crude and inanimate fluid? How is this mass to make a transition to a different structure, to sentience, to life? Through heat. And what will produce that heat in it? Motion."

"We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves."

"All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs."

"What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls."

"If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant’s reasoning to the grown man’s passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother."

"We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter."

"La reconnaissance est un fardeau, et tout fardeau est fait pour être secoué."

"Je m’entretiens avec moi-même de politique, d’amour, de goût ou de philosophie ; j’abandonne mon esprit à tout son libertinage ; je le laisse maître de suivre la première idée sage ou folle qui se présente … Mes pensées ce sont mes catins."

"People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you've got to keep your feet warm."

"Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one’s innocence with the loss of one’s prejudices."

"If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can’t deny a kind of respect for the great criminal."

"Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to."

"Shakespeare’s fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste."

"When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them."

"Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild."

"It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it."

"Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth."

"The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled."

"The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for it shape and comfort."

"In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go."