Great Throughts Treasury

"Running a house should be left to innkeepers."

"Public opinion is the worst of all opinions."

"Poets, orators, even philosophes, say the same things about fame we were told as boys to encourage us to win prizes. What they tell children to make them prefer being praised to eating jam tarts is the same idea constantly drummed into us to encourage us to sacrifice our real interests in the hope of being praised by our contemporaries or by posterity."

"Someone described Providence as the baptismal name of chance; no doubt some pious person will retort that chance is the nickname of Providence."

"Society is divided into two classes, the shearers and the shorn."

"Someone has said that to plagiarize from the ancients is to play the pirate beyond the Equator, but that to steal from the moderns is to pick pockets at street corners."

"Society ... is nothing more than the war of a thousand petty opposed interests, an eternal strife of all the vanities, which, turn in turn wounded and humiliated one by the other, intercross, come into collision, and on the morrow expiate the triumph of the eve in the bitterness of defeat. To live alone, to remain unjostled in this miserable struggle, where for a moment one draws the eyes of the spectators, to be crushed a moment later -- this is what is called being a nonentity, having no existence. Poor humanity!"

"Society would be a charming affair if we were only interested in one another."

"Someone was talking about the respect we owe the public. ?Yes,? said M?., ?It's a question of prudence. Nobody has a high opinion of fishwives but who would dare offend them while walking through the fish market.?"

"Speaking of women's favors, M. de ? used to say: It is an auction room business, and neither feeling nor merit are ever successful bidders."

"Stupidity would not be absolute stupidity did it not fear intelligence."

"The best philosophical attitude to adopt towards the world is a union of the sarcasm of gaiety with the indulgence of contempt."

"The majority of the books of our time give one the impression of having been manufactured in a day out of books read the day before."

"Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day."

"The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live."

"The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little."

"The new friends whom we make after attaining a certain age and by whom we would fain replace those whom we have lost, are to our old friends what glass eyes, false teeth and wooden legs are to real eyes, natrual teeth and legs of flesh and bone."

"The perfect man? is in a well-lit area watching the foolish antics of people stumbling around in the dark. He can demolish with a laugh the false standards and judgments which others apply to people and things."

"The person of intellect is lost unless they unite with energy of character. When we have the lantern of Diogenese we must also have his staff."

"There is a melancholy that stems from greatness."

"The philosopher who would fain extinguish his passions resembles the chemist who would like to let his furnace go out."

"The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity."

"Thought consoles us for all, and heals all. If at times it does you ill, ask it for the remedy for that ill and it will give it to you."

"There is no history worthy attention save that of free nations; the history of nations under the sway of despotism is no more than a collection of anecdotes."

"There is something is common between literary, and above all theatrical, reputations and the fortunes which used of old to be made in the West Indies. In the early days it was almost sufficient to reach those islands to return with incalculable riches; but the very vastness of the fortunes thus obtained was prejudicial to those of the following generation, since the exhausted earth could yield no more."

"'Tis easier to make certain things legal than to make them legitimate."

"Vain is equivalent to empty; thus vanity is so miserable a thing, that one cannot give it a worse name than its own. It proclaims itself for what it is."

"To help a man suffering from dropsy, it's far better to cure his thirst than to offer him a barrel of wine. Apply this principle to the wealthy."

"We leave unmolested those who set the fire to the house, and prosecute those who sound the alarm."

"We ought to be able to combine opposites: the love of goodness with indifference to other people's opinions, a liking for work with indifference to fame, concern for our health with indifference to life."

"What I learned I no longer know; the little I still know, I guessed."

"What makes the success of many books consists in the affinity there is between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public."

"When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws."

"When I hear it contended that the least sensitive are, on the whole, the most happy, I recall the Indian proverb: ?It's better to sit than to stand, it is better lie down than to sit, but death is best of all.?"

"Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more."