People From Paris

"Eripuit Coelo fulmen, mox Sceptra Tyrannis."

"O Richard! O mon Roi! L'univers t'abandonne!"

"Translated: O Richard! O my king! The universe forsakes thee!"

"I have been reading Madame Roland's memoirs and have come to the conclusion that she was a very over-rated woman; snobbish, vain, sentimental, envious — rather a German type. Her last days before her execution were spent in chronicling petty social snubs or triumphs of many years back. She was a democrat chiefly from envy of the noblesse."

"O Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom!"

"The King's colours were white and black, which he always wore in honour of the Duchess of Valentinois, who was a widow. The Duke of Ferrara and his retinue had yellow and red. Monsieur de Guise's carnation and white. It was not known at first for what reason he wore those colours, but it was soon remembered that they were the colours of a beautiful young lady whom he had been in love with, while she was a maid, and whom he yet loved though he durst not show it. The Duke de Nemours had yellow and black; why he had them could not be found out: Madam de Cleves only knew the reason of it; she remembered to have said before him she loved yellow, and that she was sorry her complexion did not suit that colour. As for the Duke, he thought he might take that colour without any indiscretion, since not being worn by Madam de Cleves it could not be suspected to be hers."

"Do you recall that night in June Upon the Danube River; We listened to the ländler-tune, We watched the moonbeams quiver."

"I sit beside my lonely fire And pray for wisdom yet: For calmness to remember Or courage to forget."

"A Persian ambassador asked the wife of Leonidas, why they paid such honors to the women at Lacedemon? "It is," replied she, "because they have entirely the forming of the men." (p. 143)."

"Birth bestows less of honour than it demands; and to boast of ancestry is but to praise the merit of others. (p. 139)."

"The love of esteem is the life and soul of society; it unites us to one another : I want your approbation, you stand in need of mine. By forsaking the converse of men, we forsake the virtues necessary for society; for when one is alone, one is apt to grow negligent; the world forces you to have a guard over yourself. (p. 155)."

"The owning of faults is no hard matter for persons that find a fund within themselves to mend them. (p. 153)."

"We are not indeed obliged always to speak what we think, but we must always think what we speak. (p. 149)."

"We fancy frequently that we have no grudge but against the men, when indeed our malignity is owing to their places : persons in great posts never yet enjoyed them with the good liking of the world, which only begins to do them justice when they are out of place. (p. 148)."

"The world steals us from ourselves and solitude restores us. The world is composed of a herd, which are ever flying from themselves. (p. 136)."

"To live in perpetual employment, is to travel rapidly through life. Tranquility lengthens our existence. (p. 136)."

"To form a complete judgment of any one, we ought to have seen him acting the last part. (p. 126)."

"The time of Christians is the price with which they purchase eternity. (p. 121)."

"One of the duties of old-age, is the management of time. The less that remains to us, the more valuable we ought to consider it. (p. 121)."

"Would you be esteemed? live with persons that are estimable. (p. 57)."

"A man that does not aim at raising to himself a great name, will never perform any great actions. And such as go carelessly on in the road of their professions suffer all the fatigues, without acquiring either the honour or recompense that naturally attend it. (p. 137)."

"The principal merit which should be required in our friends, is virtue : It is that which assures us they are capable of friendship, and worthy of it : expect nothing from your connections, when they have not this foundation. (pp. 54-55)."

"Shame is a secret pride; and pride is an error with regard to one's own worth, and an injustice with regard to what one has a mind to appear to others. (p. 204)."

"It is not always our faults that ruin us, but the manner of our conduct after we have committed them. (p. 200)."

"We live with [our defects] as we do with the perfumes that we wear, we do not smell them ; they only incommode others. (p. 195)."

"The pleasures of the world are deceitful; they promise more than they give. They trouble us in seeking them, they do not satisfy us when possessing them and they make us despair in losing them. (p. 172)."

"We spoil the dispositions nature has given to women ; we neglect their education, fill their minds with nothing solid, and destine them solely to please, and to please only by their graces or their vices."

"With great employments and vulgar maxims, one is always restless and uneasy : it is not places, but reason, that removes anxiety from the mind. (p. 170)."

"Your tribunal is seated in your own breast, why then should you seek it elsewhere? (p. 168)."

"Take care that your studies influence your manners. (p. 165)."

"The most necessary disposition to relish pleasures is to know how to be without them. (p. 160)."

"I deny any government, elected or not, the right to kidnap my children and ship them off to a battlefield to kill or be killed. I accept to pay taxes and that's the sum total of my debt to my government. In every other respect, my government owes me, not the other way around.Conscription is the most fundamental denial of liberty, on a par with slavery.I am not a pacifist and I support a professional army. But I oppose the draft even in times of war. If your country cannot find enough volunteers to defend itself when attacked, then it's not worth defending."

"The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted, are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wilderness?"

"I speak from ignorance. Who once learned much, but speaks from ignorance now."

"Where there's no stop and go a thought may wet your face, a breath arrest your stare."

"If we designate as intelligence, quantitatively, the total of mental functioning, it is evident that the suppression of verbal thought involves a defect, relatively very important among cultivated individuals leading a complex social life: the uneducated person from this point of view is a defective."

"On ne fait non plus de cas de pauvres que de couillons: on les laisse à la porte; jamais n'entrent."

"Le rire pour l'âme et le vin pour le corps."

"I think I see another motive in the French writers who in 1914 adopted the attitude of M. Romain Rolland – the fear that they would fall into national partiality if they admitted that their nation was in the right. It may be asserted that these writers would have warmly taken up the cause of France, if France had not been their own country. Whereas Barrès said, "I always maintain my country is right even if it is in the wrong," these strange friends of justice are not unwilling to say: "I always maintain my country is in the wrong, even if it is right." There again we see that the frenzy of impartiality, like any other frenzy, leads to injustice."

"The true clerc is Vauvenargues, Lamarck, Fresnel, … Spinoza, Schiller, Baudelaire, César Franck, who were never diverted from single-hearted adoration of the beautiful and the divine by the necessity of earning their daily bread. But such clercs are inevitably rare. … The rule is that the living creature condemned to struggle for life turns to practical passions, and thence to the sanctifying of those passions."

"If shame is cried upon him, … he will point out … that today he has to earn his living, and that it is not his fault if he is eager to support the class which takes a pleasure in his productions."

"One of the principle causes is that the modern world has made the clerc into a citizen, subject to all the responsibilities of a citizen, and consequently to despise lay passions is far more difficult for him than for his predecessors."

"Since the Greeks the predominant attitude of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as (like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers would have agreed with … Renan’s verdict that the man who loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against that divinity. … The modern clercs have violently torn up this charter. They proclaim the intellectual functions are only respectable to the extent that they are bound up with the pursuit of concrete advantage."

"That teaching according to which intellectual activity is worthy of esteem to the extent that it is practical and to that extent alone."

"Teachers … preach “the superiority of the intelligence”; but they preach it because in their opinion it is the intelligence which shows us the actions required for our interests, i.e. from exactly the same passion for the practical."

"From his loftiest pulpit the modern clerc assures man that he is great in proportion as he is practical."

"Philosophy, which formerly raised man to feel conscious of himself because he was a thinking being and to say, ‘I think therefore I am,” now raises him to say … “I think, therefore I am not,” (unless he takes thought into consideration only in that humble region where it is confused with action)."

"That teaching of modern metaphysics which exhorts man to feel comparatively little esteem for the truly thinking portion of himself and to honor the active and willing part of himself with all his devotion..."

"The desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action..."

"What these thinkers despise in the man of study is precisely the man who … does not predicate the capture of its environment by the species, or who, if he does predicate it, as the scientist does by his discoveries, retains for himself only the joy of knowledge and abandons the practical exploitation of his discoveries to others."