Quotes from Benjamin Constant

The great question in life is the suffering we cause, and the most ingenious metaphysics do not justify the man who has broken the heart that loved him.

Every time government attempts to handle our affairs, it costs more and the results are worse than if we had handled them ourselves.

There are things one does not say for a long time, but, once they are said, one never stops repeating them.

The great question in life is the suffering we cause, and the most ingenious metaphysics do not justify the man who has broken the heart that loved him.

Every time government attempts to handle our affairs, it costs more and the results are worse than if we had handled them ourselves.

Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. (1804)

Woe to the man who in the first moments of a love-affair does not believe that it will last forever! Woe to him who even in the arms of some mistress who has just yielded to him maintains an awareness of trouble to come and foresees that he may later tear himself away!

Nearly always, so as to live at peace with ourselves, we disguise our own impotence and weakness as calculation and policy; it is our way of placating that half of our being which is in a sense a spectator of the other.

We are such volatile creatures, we finally feel sentiments we feign

La variété, c'est la vie, l'uniformité, c'est la mort." [ De l'esprit de conquête et de l'usurpation dans leur rapports avec la civilisation européenne (1914)]

I detest that fatuity of mind which believes that what is explained is also excused; I hate that vanity which finds it interesting to describe the harm that it has done, and asks to be pitied at the end of its recital, and, as it patrols with impunity among the ruins for which it is responsible, gives to self-analysis the time which should be given to repentance.

If political authority is not limited, the division of powers, ordinarily the guarantee of freedom, becomes a danger and a scourge.

nobody in the world ever learns except at his own expense...

Be just, I would always recommend to the men in power. Be just whatever happens, because, if you cannot govern with justice, even with injustice you would not govern for long.

It is a great vice for any constitution to leave to powerful men no alternative between their own power and the scaffold.

Political liberty involves every citizen without exception in the examination and study of his most sacred interest. It aggrandizes the spirit, ennobles the mind, and establishes among all of them a sort of intellectual quality which makes for a people who are both glorious and powerful.

I may not be quite a real being. Je ne suis peut-être pas tout à fait un être réel.

And besides, I hate the vanity of a mind which thinks it excuses what it explains, I hate the conceit which is concerned only with itself while narrating the evil it has done, which tries to arouse pity by self-description and which, appearing indestructible among the ruins, analyses itself when it should be repenting. I hate that weakness which is always blaming others for its own impotence and which cannot see that the trouble is not in its surroundings but in itself.

Circumstances are quite unimportant, character is everything; in vain we break with outside things or people; we cannot break with ourselves. We change our circumstances, but we take with us into each new situation the torment we had hoped to leave behind, and as we cannot shake ourselves any better by a change of scene, we simply find that we have added remorse to regrets and misdeeds to sufferings.

The moral principle 'it is a duty to tell the truth' would, if taken unconditionally and singly, make all society impossible.

It is true that love is a feeling one places, whenever one feels the need of placing it, on the first object that happens along

Of all political curses the most terrible is an assembly that is but the instrument of a single man.

La guerre est antérieure au commerce ; car la guerre et le commerce ne sont que deux moyens différents d'atteindre le même but : celui de posséder ce que l'on désire.

L'amour n'est qu'un point lumineux, et néanmoins il semble s'emparer du temps. Il y a peu de jours qu'il n'existait pas, bientôt il n'existera plus ; mais tant qu'il existe, il répand sa clarté sur l'époque qui l'a précédé, comme sur celle qui doit la suivre.