Montesquieu Quotes

Wisdom is better than wit, and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.

With comedy, you have to do it right. In a drama, there's a lot of different ways to succeed in a moment. But comedy comes from reality. You can't try to be funny.

each time that I have run away - and from a habit it quickly became an illness - I have betrayed someone. Myself, but not always only myself.

And if my present actions strike you as foolish, let's just say I've been accused of folly by a fool.

Presumption first blinds a man, then sets him a running.

I am simply an agnostic. I haven't yet had time or opportunity to explore the universe, and I don't know what I might run on to in some nook or corner.

The folly of mistaking oneself for an oracle is built right into us.

Every step in every proud life is a run from safety to the dark, and the only thing to trust is what we think is true.

Furthermore, what profit was it to me that I, rascally slave of selfish ambitions that I was, read and understood by myself as many books as I could get concerning the so-called liberal arts?...I had turned my back to the light and my face to the things it illuminated, and so no light played upon my own face, or on the eyes that perceived them.

There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity; of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it.

People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.

In the beginning the Gods made man, and fashioned the sky and the sea, And the earth's fair face for man's dwelling-place, and this was the Gods' decree: "Lo, We have given to man five wits: he discerneth folly and sin; He is swift to deride all the world outside, and blind to the world within: So that man may make sport and amuse Us, in battling for phrases or pelf, Now that each may know what forebodeth woe to his neighbor, and not to himself.

Even in an intensely mediated world, in a world that offers at least the illusion of radical self-invention and radical freedom of choice, I as a novelist am drawn to the things you can't get away from. Because much of the promise of radical self-invention, of defining yourself through this marvelous freedom of choice, it's just a lie. It's a lie that we all buy into, because it helps the economy run.

You think intelligence and grit can succeed by themselves, but I'm telling you that's a pretty illusion.

One night I dreamed I was running. When I woke up I forgot I had a limp, so I walked totally normal until I remembered, 'oh, yeah, I have a limp'. Then I immediately stumbled. That showed me that if you have control over your mind, you can do anything.

Giving advice is many times only the privilege of saying a foolish thing one's self, under the pretense of hindering another from doing one.

The uplifters are forever running around telling blockheads they would do better if they would believe in themselves. But they already do. That is why they are blockheads.

Answer a fool according to his folly, Lest he be wise in his own eyes.

Every man's vanity ought to be his greatest shame; and every man's folly ought to be his greatest secret.

We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.

Some people seem born with a head in which the thin partition that divides great wit from folly is wanting.

Laugh as loud as you please at your companion's wit; do not even smile at his folly.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.

It doesn't matter if the truth is right there out in front of your eyes. You will find a way, a mechanism, in order to keep your own system of denial. So as I always say it, denial is a river that runs in the - in Egypt. So we became very good in that.

What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favorable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbors at all.