Dogs, like men, are punished for their loyalty.
-Chateaubriand
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
-Nietzsche
To stir mens' blood. I only speak right on; I tell you that which you yourselves do know.
—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
We must not be too afraid of being deceived.
-Vouvenargues
He who is more severe than the law is a tyrant.
-Vauvenargues
We scorn many things in order not to scorn ourselves.
-Vauvenargues
What is called a brilliant maxim is generally merely a misleading statement which, by the aid of a little truth, imposes on us a startling falsehood.
-Vauvenargues
The ordinary quality of a great heart is the possession of a lofty and courageous passion, to which all other motions, albeit keen, are subordinated; but I would not infer from this that divided enthusiasms always indicate weakness; one can only suppose that their possessors are less steadfast than the other sort.
-Vauvenargues
An author should not let his readers anticipate what he is going to say, but should induce them to think it themselves, so that they may believe he has expressed their own views, but only after they had formed them.
-Vauvenargues
The main fault, in a sense, of all books, is that they are too long.
-Vauvenargues
When something we read is obscure, we should not rack our brains to discover the meaning; on the contrary, we should put the book aside. We need but to take it up some other day or time, and the meaning will appear without any effort on our part. Perspicuity, like imagination, or any other human faculty, is not a virtue that is always with us; we are not at all times in a mood to assimilate other people’s thoughts.
-Vauvenargues
The best philosophy, relative to the world, is an alliance between the sarcasm that comes from gaiety and the indulgence that comes with scorn.
-Chamfort
Life should not be too closely regulated or too methodical.
-Bertrand Russell
If they give you lined paper, write the other way.
-Juan Ramon Jimenez
In major perplexities, try to live as if history were done with and to react like a monster riddled by serenity.
-Cioran
A patrimony all our own: the hours when we have done nothing. It is they that form us, that individualize us, that make us dissimilar.
-Cioran
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
-Cioran
Nothing desiccates a mind so much as its repugnance to conceive obscure ideas.
-Cioran
The qualities we have never make us as absurd as those we pretend to have.
-La Rochefoucauld
We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from other people.
-La Rochefoucauld
Love of glory, fear of shame, a plan to make our fortune, a desire to make our lives comfortable and attractive, and a wish to demean other people, are often the causes of the valor that men praise so highly.
-La Rochefoucauld
We ought to treat fortune like health: enjoy it when it is good, be patient when it is bad, and never use drastic remedies except in a case of absolute necessity.
-La Rochefoucauld
Fortune and temperament rule the world.
-La Rochefoucauld
Supreme cleverness lies in knowing the exact value of things.
-La Rochefoucauld
Confidence contributes more to conversation than intelligence does.
-La Rochefoucauld
Nothing prevents us from being natural as much as the wish to look natural.
-La Rochefoucauld
We would gain more by showing ourselves as we are than by trying to appear to be what we are not.
-La Rochefoucauld
It is impossible to have bad taste, but many have none at all.
-Lichtenberg
To start on a thing straightaway without putting it off for a minute, much less an hour or a day, is a way of making time expand.
-Lichtenberg
No work, and especially no work of literature, should display the effort it has cost. A writer who wants to be read by posterity must not neglect to drop into odd corners of his chapters such hints at whole books, ideas for disputations, that his readers will believe he has thousands of them to throw away.
-Lichtenberg
Many people know everything they know in the way we know the solution of a riddle after we have read it or been told it, and that is the worst kind of knowledge and the kind least to be cultivated; we ought rather to cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of in order to know it.
-Lichtenberg
I believe the path I follow is my path and that I follow it as I should. A vast confidence has become habitual to me which would be called faith, if it had subscribed to any vows.
-Andre Gide, Fruits of the Earth
Every perfect action is accompanied by pleasure. That is how you can tell that it was right for you to do it. I don’t like people who pride themselves on working painfully. If their work was painful, they had better have done something else.
-Andre Gide, Fruits of the Earth
When we are young, we dream only of living in the idea others have of us. We have to establish a reputation, and win for ourselves an honorable place in the imagination of others, and even be happy in their idea of us. Our happiness is not at all real; it is not ourselves we consult but others. When we're older we return to ourselves, and this return has its own sweetness, as we start to consult ourselves and to believe in ourselves.
-Madame la Marquise de Lambert
"Come and bear your aged friend company,” he had said to me. “Like the nosegay which a traveler sends us from some land to which we shall never go again, come and let me breathe from the far country of your adolescence the scent of those flowers of spring among which I also used to wander, many years ago. Come with the primrose, with the canon’s beard, with the gold-cup; come with the stone-crop, whereof are posies made, pledges of love, in the Balzacian flora, come with that flower of the Resurrection morning, the Easter daisy, come with the snowballs of the guelder-rose, which begin to embalm with their fragrance the alleys of your great-aunt’s garden ere the last snows of Lent are melted from its soil. Come with the glorious silken raiment of the lily, apparel fit for Solomon, and with the many-colored enamel of the pansies, but come, above all, with the spring breeze, still cooled by the last frosts of winter, wafting apart, for the two butterflies’ sake, that have waited outside all morning, the closed portals of the first Jerusalem rose.”
-Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Swann’s Way, pg. 179
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