Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Quotes
-
Eminence without merit earns deference without esteem.
-
Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame.
-
He who leaves the game wins it.
-
Men's hearts and faces are always wide asunder; women's are not only in close connection, but are mirror-like in the instant power of reflection.
-
The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.
-
Bachelors' wives and old maids' children are always perfect.
-
Pleasure may come from illusion, but happiness can come only of reality.
-
A person of intellect without energy added to it, is a failure.
-
Love is like epidemic diseases. The more one fears it the more likely one is to contract it.
-
All that I've learned, I've forgotten. The little that I still know, I've guessed.
-
It must be admitted that there are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyse before we can live happily in this world.
-
The philosopher who would fain extinguish his passions resembles the chemist who would like to let his furnace go out.
-
Pleasure can be supported by an illusion; but happiness rests upon truth.
-
The most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed.
-
Were a man to consult only his reason, who would marry? For myself, I wouldn't marry, for fear of having a son who resembled me.
-
There some trifles well habited, as there are some fools well clothed.
-
Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he's always ready to escape their control.
-
Scandal is an importunate wasp, against which we must make no movement unless we are quite sure that we can kill it; otherwise it will return to the attack more furious than ever.
-
The poor are the blacks of Europe.
-
Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is.
-
Someone has said that to plagiarise 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.
-
At the sight of what goes on in the world, the most misanthropic of men must end by being amused, and Heraclitus must die laughing.
-
Sometimes apparent resemblance of character will bring two men together and for a certain time unite them. But their mistake gradually becomes evident, and they are astonished to find themselves not only far apart, but even repelled, in some sort, at all their points of contact.
-
Spero Speroni explains admirably how an author who writes very clearly for himself is often obscure to his readers. "It is," he says, "because the author proceeds from the thought to the expression, and the reader from the expression to the thought.