Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Quotes
-
Many men and women enjoy popular esteem, not because they are known, but because they are not known.
-
We must start human society from scratch; as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding.
-
Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is.
-
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.
-
Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame.
-
There is as much expression in the feet as in the hands.
-
The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.
-
All that I've learned, I've forgotten. The little that I still know, I've guessed.
-
Satire is the disease of art.
-
In a country where everyone strives for attention, it is better to be bankrupt than to be nothing.
-
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.
-
Bachelors' wives and old maids' children are always perfect.
-
The philosopher who would fain extinguish his passions resembles the chemist who would like to let his furnace go out.
-
A person of intellect without energy added to it, is a failure.
-
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.
-
Love is like epidemic diseases. The more one fears it the more likely one is to contract it.
-
Pleasure can be supported by an illusion; but happiness rests upon truth.
-
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.
-
Nearly all men are slaves for the same reason that the Spartans assigned for the servitude of the Persians -- lack of power to pronounce the syllable, "No." To be able to utter that word and live alone, are the only means to preserve one's freedom and one's character.
-
The poor are the blacks of Europe.
-
The most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed.
-
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.
-
The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.
-
Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.