Luc de Clapiers Men Quotations

It is difficult to esteem a man as highly as he would wish.

The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition.

Men sometimes feel injured by praise because it assigns a limit to their merit; few people are modest enough not to take offense that one appreciates them.

There is nothing that fear and hope does not permit men to do.

The maxims of men reveal their characters.

Servitude debases men to the point where they end up liking it.

Fools do not understand men of intelligence.

Few men have depth enough to hear or tell the truth.

The mind of man is more intuitive than logical, and comprehends more than it can coordinate.

Learn to overrule minor interest in favor of great ones, and generously to do all the good the heart prompts; a man is never injured by acting virtuously.

The maxim that men are not to be praised before their death was invented by envy and too lightly adopted by philosophers. I, on the contrary, maintain that they ought to be praised in their lifetime if they merit it; but jealousy and calumny, roused against their virtue or their talent, labour to degrade them if any one ventures to bear testimony to them. It is unjust criticism that they should fear to hazard, not sincere praise.

A man who love only himself and his pleasures is vain, presumptuous, and wicked even from principle.

Activity makes more men's fortunes than cautiousness.

All that causes one man to differ from another is a very slight thing. What is it that is the origin of beauty or ugliness, health or weakness, ability or stupidity? A slight difference in the organs, a little more or a little less bile. Yet this more or less is of infinite importance to men; and when they think otherwise they are mistaken.

As soon as an opinion becomes common it is sufficient reason for men to abandon it and to uphold the opposite opinion until that in its turn grows old, and they require to distinguish themselves by other things. Thus if they attain their goal in some art or science, we must expect them soon to cast it aside to acquire some fresh fame, and this is partly the reason why the most splendid ages degenerate so quickly, and, scarcely emerged from barbarism, plunge into it again.

Those who fear men like laws.

There are men who are happy without knowing it.

If a man is endowed with a noble and courageous soul, if he is painstaking, proud, ambitious, without meanness, of a profound a deep-seated intelligence, I dare assert that he lacks nothing to be neglected by the great and men in high office, who fear, more than other men, those whom they cannot dominate.

Great men are sometimes so even in small things.

Great men, like nature, use simple language.

We are less hurt by the contempt of fools than by the lukewarm approval of men of intelligence.

Excessive distrust is not less hurtfJul than its opposite. Most men become useless to him who is unwilling to risk being deceived.

Man never rises to great truths without enthusiasm.

No one is more liable to make mistakes than the man who acts only on reflection.

The greatest evil that fortune can bring to men is to endow them with feeble resources and yet to make them ambitious.

Great men undertake great things because they are great; fools, because they think them easy.

Men despise great projects when they do not feel themselves capable of great successes.

All men are born truthful and die liars.

Hope deceives more men than cunning does.

Great men in teaching weak men to reflect have set them on the road to error.

Men dissimulate their dearest, most constant, and most virtuous inclination from weakness and a fear of being condemned.

Men are not to be judged by what they do not know, but by what they know, and by the manner in which they know it.

You can purchase the mind of Pascal for a crown. Pleasures even cheaper are sold to those who give themselves up to them. It is only luxuries and objects of caprice that are rare and difficult to obtain; unfortunately they are the only things that touch the curiosity and taste of ordinary men.

Superficial knowledge ... is hurtful to those who possess true genius; for it necessarily draws them away from their main object, wastes their industry over details and subjects foreign to their needs and natural talent, and lastly does not serve, as they flatter themselves, to prove the breadth of their mind. In all ages there have been men of very moderate intelligence who knew much, and so on the contrary, men of the highest intelligence who knew very little. Ignorance is not lack of intelligence, nor knowledge a proof of genius.

Peace renders nations happier and men weaker.

Mediocre men sometimes fear great office, and when they do not aim at it, or when they refuse it, all that is to be concluded is that they are aware of their mediocrity.

I do not approve the maxim which desires a man to know a little of everything. Superficial knowledge, knowledge without principles, is almost always useless and sometimes harmful knowledge.

In order to protect himself from force, man was obliged to submit to justice. Justice or force: he was compelled to choose between the two masters, so little are we made to be independent.

We must expect everything and fear everything from time and from men.

Newton, Pascal, Bossuet, Racine, F?nelon -- that is to say, some of the most enlightened men on earth, in the most philosophical of all ages -- have been believers in Jesus Christ; and the great Cond?, when dying, repeated these noble words, "Yes, I shall see God as He is, face to face!".

A man can hardly be said to have made a fortune if he does not know how to enjoy it.

It is unjust to exact that men shall do out of deference to our advice what they have no desire to do for themselves.

There does not exist a man sufficiently intelligent never to be tiresome.

It cannot be a vice in men to be sensible of their strength.

Men crowd into honorable careers without other vocation than their vanity, or at best their love of fame.

The generality of men are so bound within the sphere of their circumstances that they have not even the courage to get out of them through their ideas, and if we see a few whom, in a way, speculation over great things makes incapable of mean ones, we find still more with whom the practice of small things takes away the feeling for great ones.

The falsest of all philosophies is that which, under the pretext of delivering men from the embarrassment of their passions, counsels idleness and the abandonment and neglect of themselves.

Our errors and our controversies, in the sphere of morality, arise sometimes from looking on men as though they could be altogether bad, or altogether good.