Quotes About Quote

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

Why, like all men, she replied. Then added, repulsing him with a languid movement - You are all evil!

Surely it could not have been a dove God had chosen to speak through, since doves could not talk.

Il citait du latin, tant il était exaspéré.

What's improper about it?" retorted the clerk. "Everybody does it in Paris!" It was an irresistible and conclusive argument.

But that which fanaticism formerly promised to the elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

A man so habituated to corruption that he would happily pay for the pleasure of selling himself.

a demand for money being, of all the winds that blow upon love, the coldest and most destructive.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

I was resting in the shadow of that ideal happiness as in the shade of the poisonous manchineel tree, without foreseeing the consequences.

The more flowery a person's speech … the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed.

Colonies (nos). S'attrister quand on en parle.

Il fait une clientèle d'enfer ; l'autorité le ménage et l'opinion publique le protège. Il vient de recevoir la croix d'honneur.

I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt. [As quoted in Pol Neveux's introduction, Guy De Maupassant: A Study ]

And this is what Lord Byron said, who, nevertheless, loved women: 'They should be well fed and well dressed, but not allowed to mingle with society. They should also be taught religion, but they should ignore poetry and politics, only being allowed to read religious works or cook-books.

the pretensions of anarchism in its individualist variants have always been laughable

He had the neurotic's partial vision of life, and a sense of the absurdity which adheres to all effort when observed in the light of a long enough perspective. This had never made him popular.

By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins.

Nichts lässt die Erde mit größerer Sicherheit zur Hölle werden, als der Versuch des Menschen, sie seinem Himmel zu machen.

The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

If the work of the average man required half the mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average prostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge of starvation.