Quote collection
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"The beginnings of all things are weak and tender. We must therefore be clear-sighted in the beginnings, for, as in their budding we discern not the danger, so in their full growth we perceive not the remedy."
"And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?"
"Poetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself. Venus is not so beautiful all naked, alive, and panting, as she is here in Virgil."
"This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales."
"A lady could not boast of her chastity who was never tempted."
"If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they "artialize" nature."
"The most useful and honorable science and occupation for a woman is the science of housekeeping. I know some that are miserly, very few that are good managers."
"It is an injustice that an old, broken, half-dead father should enjoy alone, in a corner of his hearth, possessions that would suffice for the advancement and maintenance of many children."
"The world is but a school of inquisition; it is not who shall enter the ring, but who shall run the best courses."
"A hair shirt does not always render those chaste who wear it."
"Nature clasps all her creatures in a universal embrace; there is not one of them which she has not plainly furnished with all means necessary to the conservation of its being."
"And I loathe people who find it harder to put up with a gown askew than with a soul askew and who judge a man by his bow, his bearing and his boots."
"Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me--a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books."
"Their pupils and their little charges are not nourished and fed by what they learn: the learning is passed from hand to hand with only one end in view: to show it off, to put into our accounts to entertain others with it, as though it were merely counters, useful for totting up and producing statements, but having no other use or currency. 'Apud alios loqui didicerunt, non ipsi secum' [They have learned how to talk with others, not with themselves]"
"Reason has so many forms that we do not know which to choose-Experiment has no fewer."
"While our pulse beats and we feel emotion, let us put off the business. Things will truly seem different to us when we have quieted and cooled down. It is passion that is in command at first, it is passion that speaks, it is not we ourselves."
"Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen."
"Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from whathe is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done."
"Authors communicate with the people by some special extrinsic mark; I am the first to do so by my entire being, as Michel de Montaigne."
"..a man may live long, yet live very little. Satisfaction in life depends not on the number of your years, but on your will."