Quotes About Rabelais

His religion at best is an anxious wish,-like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.

The canons of literary taste as they have hardened in the twentieth century leave little place for Rabelais.

One ought to know everything, to write. All of us scribblers are monstrously ignorant. If only we weren't lacking in stamina, what a rich field of ideas and similes we could tap! Books that have been the source of entire literatures, like Homer and Rabelais, contain the sum of all the knowledge of their times. They knew everything, those fellows, and we know nothing.

there are more fools than wise men in all societies, and the larger party always gains the upper hand

This flea which I have in mine ear.

Before he was seventeen, Flaubert was reading Victor Hugo, Byron, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Montaigne, and early acquired the conviction that there was no such thing as indecency in true literature. For a while, the literature of the schoolmasters seemed to him not to be literature at all.

Wisdom entereth not into a malicious mind.

And the diseases from which we civilized people suffer most are melancholy and pessimism. So I, for instance, who can count so many years of my life during which I lost any inclination to laugh - leaving aside whether or not this was my own fault - I, for one, feel the need for a really good laugh above all else. I've found it in Guy de Maupassant, and there are others - Rabelais among the older writers

He wasn't an adventurer, he wasn't a rascally pilgarlic like one of those lean rogues lambasted in Rabelais who set their scurvy wits to deface, deflower, debauch and abduct, some sweet-blooded noble wench of an ancient breed.

Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

pantagruelion. It is quite plainly hemp and Rabelais was obviously very familiar with it. This is hardly surprising when one considers his father had farmed hemp at Cinais, three miles south-west of Chinon, on the River Vienne.