67 Quotes by Joseph de Maistre

To know how to wait. It is the great secret of success.

Man’s destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing.

What a miserable world! – trouble if we love, and trouble if we do not love.

It is not the mediocrity of women’s education which makes their weakness; it is their weakness which necessarily causes their mediocrity.

It is one of man’s curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties for the pleasure of resolving them.

I don’t know what a scoundrel is like, but I know what a respectable man is like, and it’s enough to make one’s flesh creep.

The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.

How strange is the blindness of men in our age. They boast of their knowledge, and are ignorant of everything, since they are ignorant of themselves. They know not what they are, nor what they can do. An invincible pride bears them on continually to overthrow every thing which they have not made; and in order to work out new creations, they separate themselves from the source of all existence.

Now, there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him.