Quotes by French authors

"Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need"

"Happiness is where we find it, but rarely where we seek it"

"Nothing succeeds like success"

"Concupiscence and force are the source of all our actions; concupiscence causes voluntary actions, force involuntary ones"

"What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy"

"Victory belongs to the most persevering"

"It's easier to be wise for others than for ourselves"

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him"

"They might in the future more than ever before engage in hunting beavers"

"Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face"

"I directed the men in our barque to approach near the savages, and hold their arms in readiness to do their duty in case they notice any movement of these people against us"

"Everything has been figured out, except how to live"

"No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist"

"The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it"

"The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason"

"The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire"

"The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence"

"The flowery style is not unsuitable to public speeches or addresses, which amount only to compliment. The lighter beauties are in their place when there is nothing more solid to say; but the flowery style ought to be banished from a pleading, a sermon, or a didactic work"

"It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it"

"We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest"

"This self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it"

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"

"A picture is worth a thousand words"

"Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires"

"Secrecy is the first essential in affairs of state"

"War is one of the scourges with which it has pleased God to afflict men"

"Carry on any enterprise as if all future success depended on it"

"A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession"

"Modern people are only willing to believe in their computers, while I believe in myself"

"You believe in God, then you don't believe anymore and when you have a big problem, you pray anyway"