Quotes from Benjamin Constant

Es un gran paso, un paso irreparable, cuando desvelamos de golpe ante un tercero los repliegues ocultos de una relación íntima; la luz que penetra en el santuario constata y culmina las destrucciones que la oscuridad escondía entre sus sombras: del mismo modo que los cuerpos encerrados en sus tumbas conservan a menudo su forma original hasta que el aire exterior los golpea y los reduce a polvo.

El amor sustituye la falta de recuerdos de un modo casi mágico. Todos los demás afectos necesitan el pasado: el amor crea un pasado como por encantamiento y nos rodea de él. Nos da, por así decirlo, la conciencia de haber vivido durante años con un ser que no hace mucho nos resultaba casi extraño. El amor es sólo un punto luminoso, y sin embargo parece apoderarse del tiempo.

Devii ner?bd?tor s? traversezi cît mai repede via?a, pentru a sc?pa de oameni.

Le lingue straniere ringiovaniscono i pensieri.

Las circunstancias significan poca cosa,el carácter en cambio lo es todo;en vano rompemos con las cosas y los seres ajenos; no podemos romper con nosotros mismos. Cambiamos la situación, pero arrastramos con nosotros el tormento del que esperábamos librarnos; y como nadie puede corregirse simplemente desplazándose, uno se encuentra con que no ha hecho otra cosa que añadir remordimientos a las penas y pecados a los sufrimientos.

It was not just one career I mourned; as I had never tried any career I mourned them all. Never having put my talents to the test, I imagined they were limitless and cursed them because of it, wishing nature had made me weak and commonplace, and spared me at any rate the remorse that comes from deliberate self-abasement. Any praise or approval of my intelligence or knowledge seemed an unbearable reproach, like hearing admiration for the powerful arms of an athlete chained down in a dungeon.

One does not conjure away dangers by shielding them from the public eye. Far from it: they grow from the very night which surrounds them. Objects look larger in the darkness. In the shadow, everything appears gigantic and hostile.

Your party man, however excellent his intentions may be, is always opposed to any limitation of sovereignty. He regards himself as the next in succession, and handles gently the property that is to come to him, even while his opponents are its tenants.

It is one thing to defend one's fatherland, another to attack people who themselves have a fatherland to defend. The spirit of conquest seeks to confuse these two ideas. Some governments, when they send their armies from one pole to the other, still talk about the defence of their hearths; one would think they call all the places to which they have set fire their hearths.

Could if be that there is something dubious about hope and that when hope has disappeared from a man's life his life assumes a more severe and positive character? Could it be that life seems so much the more real when all illusions have vanished, just as the contours of a mountain ridge appear more clearly on the horizon when the clouds are gone?

Thus it is that bodies shut in tombs often preserve their original shape until the outside air reaches them and reduces them to dust.

I have made you very merry at the expense of all our friends; but do not go on to suppose that, because I have made fun of them with you, I am obliged not to make fun of you with them. I warn you that there is no such understanding between us.

Fools keep their moral code in a compact and indivisible whole so that it may interfere as little as possible with their actions and leave them their freedom in all matters of detail.

Sovereignty has only a limited and relative existence. At the point where independence and individual existence begin, the jurisdiction of sovereignty ends.

There is a bizarre notion according to which it is claimed that because men are corrupt, it is necessary to give certain of them all the more power... on the contrary, they must be given less power.

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

No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being.