Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Quotes
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Obscurity and Innocence, twin sisters, escape temptations which would pierce their gossamer armor, in contact with the world.
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It is among uneducated women that we may look for the most confirmed gossips. Goethe tells us there is nothing more frightful than bustling ignorance.
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Someone described Providence as the baptismal name of chance; no doubt some pious person will retort that chance is the nickname of Providence.
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Man may aspire to virtue, but he cannot reasonably aspire to truth.
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An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.
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Hope is but a charlatan that ceases not to deceive us. For myself happiness only began when I had lost it.
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There aren't many benefactors who don't say, like Satan: All these things will I give you if you bow down and worship me.
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Slander is the balm of malignity.
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One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be idiocy because it has been able to appeal to the majority
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Where violence reigns, reason is weak.
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A modicum of discord is the very spice of courtship.
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The threat of a neglected cold is for doctors what the threat of purgatory is for priests-a gold mine.
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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.
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Education must have two foundations --morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.
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The sunset glow of self-possession.
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Celebrity is the advantage of being known to people who we don't know, and who don't know us.
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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.
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In living and in seeing other men, the heart must break or become as bronze.
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She commands who is blest with indifference.
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Covetousness is a sort of mental gluttony, not confined to money, but craving honor, and feeding on selfishness.
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Tragedy has the great moral defect of giving too much importance to life and death.
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Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors.
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Women see faults much more readily in each other than they can discover perfections.
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Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything.