Quote collection
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"It is probable that the principal credit of miracles, visions, enchantments, and such extraordinary occurrences comes from the power of imagination, acting principally upon the minds of the common people, which are softer."
"We imagine much more appropriately an artisan on his toilet seat or on his wife than a great president, venerable by his demeanorand his ability. It seems to us that they do not stoop from their lofty thrones even to live."
"When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of the thing."
"Whatever is preached to us, and whatever we learn, we should still remember that it is man that gives, and man that receives; it is a mortal hand that presents it to us, it is a mortal hand that accepts it."
"If love and ambition should be in equal balance, and come to jostle with equal force, I make no doubt but that the last would win the prize."
"Whatever I may be, I want to be elsewhere than on paper. My art and my industry have been employed in making myself good for something; my studies, in teaching me to do, not to write. I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work."
"Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light; for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop."
"Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead."
"If not for that of conscience, yet at least for ambition's sake, let us reject ambition, let us disdain that thirst of honor and renown, so low and mendicant; that it makes us beg it of all sorts of people."
"To behave rightly, we ourselves should never lay a hand on our servants as long as our anger lasts. Things will seem different to us when we have quieted and cooled down."
"My opinion is that we must lend ourselves to others and give ourselves only to ourselves. If my will happened to be prone to mortgage and attach itself, I would not last: I am too tender, both by nature and by practice."
"It was truly very good reason that we should be beholden to God only, and to the favour of his grace, for the truth of so noble a belief, since from his sole bounty we receive the fruit of immortality, which consists in the enjoyment of eternal beatitude.... The more we give and confess to owe and render to God, we do it with the greater Christianity."
"Pleasure itself is painful at the bottom."
"All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me."
"Ambition sufficiently plagues her proselytes, by keeping themselves always in show, like the statue of a public place."
"What am I to choose? "Choose what you please, as long as you choose." There you have a foolish answer, which seems to be the outcome, however, of all Dogmatism, which will not allow us to be ignorant of that which we are ignorant."
"Experience teaches that a strong memory is generally joined to a weak judgment."
"Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to."
"As far as I am concerned, no road that would lead us to health is either arduous or expensive."
"To know how to live is my trade and my art."