Sourced and curated.

I am condemned to be free.

I think, therefore I am.

Rene Descartes

Discourse on Method · 1637

★ 9.1

Essay · Philosophical literature

Jean-Paul Sartre

Being and Nothingness · 1943

★ 8.5

An invasion of armies can be resisted; an invasion of ideas cannot be resisted.

Victor Hugo

1878

★ 8.4

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Candide · 1759

★ 7.6

If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?

Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake.

Candide · 1759

★ 7.4

Napoleon Bonaparte

1805

★ 7.3

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

Pensees · 1662

★ 7.3

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

1768

★ 7.1

Play

Hell is other people.

Jean-Paul Sartre

1944

★ 7.1

We never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.

Pensees · 1662

★ 7.1

God is, or He is not. But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separates us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?... If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

Pensees · 1662

★ 7.0

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?

Candide · 1759

★ 7.0

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

Anais Nin

1941

★ 7.0

How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?

Charles de Gaulle

1962

★ 7.0

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earth-worn, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.

Pensees · 1670

★ 7.0

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

See many skies and seas.

Gustave Flaubert

1857

★ 7.0

Victor Hugo

1864

★ 7.0

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 7.0

Bernard of Chartres

1159

★ 6.9

Poem

Happy is he who, like Ulysses, has made a glorious voyage.

Joachim du Bellay

Les Regrets · 1558

★ 6.9

Play · Tragicomedy

To conquer without risk is to triumph without glory.

Pierre Corneille

Le Cid · 1636

★ 6.9

There are no small steps in great affairs.

Jean-Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz

1717

★ 6.9

To govern is to choose.

Pierre-Marc-Gaston de Levis

1808

★ 6.9

Time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Hector Berlioz

1856

★ 6.9

On Earth there is no heaven, but there are pieces of it.

Jules Renard

1896

★ 6.9

The very touch of the letter was as if you had taken me all into your arms.

Anais Nin

1932

★ 6.9

Seeing is forgetting the name of the things one sees.

Paul Valery

1936

★ 6.9

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eyes.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The Little Prince · 1943

★ 6.9

There is nothing in the world which does not have its decisive moment, and the masterpiece of good management is to recognize and grasp this moment.

Jean-Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz

1717

★ 6.9

Food writing

Alcohol is the prince of liquids, and carries the palate to its highest pitch of exaltation.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

The Physiology of Taste · 1825

★ 6.9

Magazine

The more things change, the more they are the same.

Alphonse Karr

1849

★ 6.9

Experience shows us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

1939

★ 6.9

Poem

Hope raises no dust.

Paul Eluard

1946

★ 6.9

Religious insanity is very common in the United States.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 6.4

I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.

Rene Descartes

Meditations on First Philosophy · 1641

★ 6.3

No human creature can give orders to love.

George Sand

Jacques · 1834

★ 6.2

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 6.2

The love of wealth is therefore to be traced, as either a principal or accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do; this gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness.

France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 6.2

Poster

Charles de Gaulle

1940

★ 6.2

Fable and fairytale

I bend but do not break.

Jean de La Fontaine

1668

★ 6.1

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.

Reflections · 1678

★ 6.1

The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

A service beyond all recompense Weighs so heavy that it almost gives offense.

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 6.1

Play · Tragedy (play) · Tragedy

Pierre Corneille

Surena · 1674

★ 6.0

Philosophical literature · Political literature

God is stupidity and cowardice; God is hypocrisy and falsehood. God is tyranny and poverty; God is evil. For as long as men bow before altars, mankind will remain damned, the slaves of kings and priests.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

The System of Economic Contradictions · 1846

★ 6.0

Of all sexual aberrations perhaps the most curious is chastity.

Remy de Gourmont

1903

★ 6.0

The sons of torture-victims make good terrorists.

Andre Malraux

Man's Fate · 1933

★ 6.0

Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain. And the future as the past would be present to its eyes.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

1812

★ 6.0

My center is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking.

Ferdinand Foch

1914

★ 6.0

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

Gaston Bachelard

The Poetics of Space · 1958

★ 5.9

The last act is bloody, no matter how happy the rest of the play.

Speak the truth and shame the Devil.

Pensees · 1670

★ 5.5

Novel · Satirical fiction · Satire

Francois Rabelais

Gargantua and Pantagruel · 1564

★ 5.5

I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice.

Essays · 1580

★ 5.5

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

Historical literature · Feminist literature

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 5.5

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons hitherto brought forward in explanation of this fact has seemed adequate.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 5.5

Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgement on him.

Essays · 1580

★ 5.4

It happens as with the cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

Essays · 1580

★ 5.4

Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for everybody thinks he is so well supplied with it, that even those most difficult to please in all other matters never desire more of it than they already possess.

Rene Descartes

Discourse on Method · 1637

★ 5.4

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.

1767

★ 5.4

Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure.... Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him.

Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 5.4

Poem

Arthur Rimbaud

The Drunken Boat · 1871

★ 5.4

France cannot be France without greatness.

Charles de Gaulle

1954

★ 5.4

For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits.

Essays · 1580

★ 5.3

Extremes meet.

Louis Sebastian Mercier

1782

★ 5.3

Once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me... Immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater.

In Search of Lost Time · 1913

★ 5.3

Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.

The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the "outlaw," the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.

In Search of Lost Time · 1921

★ 5.3

Michel Foucault

Discipline and Punish · 1975

★ 5.3

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out candles and fans fires.

Reflections · 1678

★ 5.2

In the misfortune of our best friends we often find something that is not displeasing.

FIRST LAW: In every animal... A more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ... While the permanent disuse of any organ imperceptibly weakens and deteriorates it, and progressively diminishes its functional capacity, until it finally disappears. SECOND LAW: All the acquisitions or losses wrought by nature in individuals... Are preserved by reproductions to the new individuals which arise.

Reflections · 1678

★ 5.2

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Philosophie Zoologique · 1809

★ 5.2

Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning, It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.

Charles Baudelaire

1867

★ 5.2

Electric flesh-arrows...traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.

Anais Nin

1937

★ 5.2

To name an object is to take away three-fourths of the pleasure given by a poem. This pleasure consists in guessing little by little to suggest it, that is the ideal.

Stephane Mallarme

1891

★ 5.1

Scientific literature

Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night. But it is this gleam which is everything.

Henri Poincare

The Value of Science · 1905

★ 5.1

If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.

Jacques Barzun

The House of Intellect · 1959

★ 5.1

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.

Andre Malraux

1943

★ 5.0

We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

George Steiner

1967

★ 5.0

We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and smug in "the social," our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.

Jean Baudrillard

1987

★ 5.0

Novel · Satirical fiction · Satire

To laugh is proper to man.

Francois Rabelais

Gargantua and Pantagruel · 1534

★ 4.7

We know the truth, not only by the reason, but by the heart.

Pensees · 1670

★ 4.7

We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands.

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary · 1857

★ 4.7

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.

Things are always at their best in their beginning.

Essays · 1580

★ 4.6

1656

★ 4.6

In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other.

Philosophical Dictionary · 1764

★ 4.6

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

The Blood of Others · 1945

★ 4.6

The easy, gentle and sloping path…is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.

The first step is the hardest.

Essays · 1580

★ 4.5

Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond

1763

★ 4.5

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

1778

★ 4.5

In the desert there is all-and yet nothing…God is there and man is not.

Honore de Balzac

La Comedie humaine · 1830

★ 4.5

They have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.

Democracy in America · 1835

★ 4.5

There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

Historical literature · Feminist literature

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 4.5

When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 4.5

The head is ever the dupe of the heart.

Marriage must ceaselessly combat a monster that devours everything: habit.

Reflections · 1678

★ 4.5

Honore de Balzac

Physiologie du Mariage · 1829

★ 4.5

There can be no progress (real, that is, moral) except in the individual and by the individual himself.

Charles Baudelaire

1867

★ 4.5

The whole secret of the study of nature lies in learning how to use one's eyes.

George Sand

1869

★ 4.5

Psychological literature

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

Daniel Kahneman

Thinking, Fast and Slow · 2011

★ 4.5

If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.

Reflections · 1678

★ 4.4

The pleasure of love is in the loving. We are happier in the passion we feel than in that we arouse.

Reflections · 1678

★ 4.4

The most decisive actions of our life-I mean those that our most likely to decide the whole course of our future-are more often than not, unconsidered.

Andre Gide

The Counterfeiters · 1926

★ 4.4

Although human life is priceless, we always act as if something had an even greater price than life…but what is that something?

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

1931

★ 4.4

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.

Simone Weil

1940

★ 4.4

One of the best things about love is just recognizing a man's step when he climbs the stairs.

Colette

1941

★ 4.4

The world began without the human race and it will end without it... Man has never-save only when he reproduces himself-done other than cheerfully dismantle millions upon millions of structures and reduce their elements to a state in which they can no longer be reintegrated.

Claude Levi-Strauss

Tristes Tropiques · 1955

★ 4.4

Lecture

To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to will to do the like again-these are the essential conditions for the making of a people.

Ernest Renan

1882

★ 4.3

Scientific literature

To doubt everything and to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; each saves us from thinking.

Henri Poincare

Science and Hypothesis · 1902

★ 4.3

There are moments when everything goes well; don't be frightened, it won't last.

Jules Renard

1908

★ 4.3

Play

There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.

Eugene Ionesco

1959

★ 4.3

The extermination camps, in endeavoring to turn man into a beast, intimated that it is not life alone which makes him man.

Andre Malraux

1967

★ 4.3

My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas's court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face.

Jean-Dominique Bauby

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly · 1997

★ 4.3

Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage.

Albert Schweitzer

1949

★ 4.2

Historical literature · Feminist literature

To tell the truth, one is not born a genius: one becomes a genius.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 4.0

Men blaspheme what they do not know.

Pensees · 1662

★ 3.9

The skeptical are the most credulous.

Pensees · 1662

★ 3.9

We shall die alone.

Pensees · 1662

★ 3.9

We must cultivate our garden.

Candide · 1759

★ 3.9

Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Candide · 1759

★ 3.9

Historical literature

Napoleon Bonaparte

1812

★ 3.9

Nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty.

Democracy in America · 1835

★ 3.9

At every step the natural light which illuminates their path grows dimmer and less secure; and that, in spite of all their efforts, they have as yet only discovered a small number of conflicting notions, on which the mind of man has been tossed about for thousands of years, without either laying a firmer grasp on truth, or finding novelty even in its errors.

All for one, one for all.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 3.9

Novel · Historical fiction · Adventure novel

Alexandre Dumas

The Three Musketeers · 1844

★ 3.9

Take away time is money, and what is left of England? Take away cotton is king, and what is left of America?

Victor Hugo

Les Miserables · 1862

★ 3.9

For we do not easily expect evil of those whom we love most.

Peter Abelard

1132

★ 3.8

Where true love is, it showeth; it will not feign.

I have freed my soul.

Bernard of Clairvaux

1152

★ 3.8

Christine de Pizan

1399

★ 3.8

Everyone calls barbarism what is not customary to him.

Essays · 1580

★ 3.8

I want death to find me planting my cabbages.

Essays · 1580

★ 3.8

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be oneself.

Essays · 1580

★ 3.8

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

Essays · 1580

★ 3.8

Virtue shuns ease as a companion... It demands a rough and thorny path.

Essays · 1580

★ 3.8

All human misfortune comes from this one thing: man's being unable to sit still in a room.

Pensees · 1662

★ 3.8

The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it.

Pensees · 1662

★ 3.8

Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.

One is easily fooled by that which one loves.

Pensees · 1662

★ 3.8

Play · Comedy (play)

Moliere

Tartuffe · 1669

★ 3.8

Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.

Love truth, but pardon error.

Pensees · 1670

★ 3.8

Use, do not abuse... Neither abstinence not excess ever renders man happy.

1738

★ 3.8

Speech

1738

★ 3.8

God is on the side not of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots.

1750

★ 3.8

She blushed and so did he. She greeted him in a faltering voice, and he spoke to her without knowing what he was saying.

Candide · 1759

★ 3.8

When the masses get involved in reasoning, everything is lost.