“Every passion makes us commit faults, but love leads us into the most ridiculous blunders.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
Month: July 2020
“Vivacity in the old is not far removed from foolishness.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“The worst form of ridicule to which old people, once charming, are susceptible, is to forget that they are no longer attractive.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“Each age of life is new to us, and we find ourselves hampered by inexperience regardless of our years.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“Praising the mighty for the virtues they do not possess is one method of insulting them with impunity.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“Folly may be cured; an evil mind never.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“Why is it that our memory recalls even the minutest details of our experiences, but cannot recall how many times we have told the same story to the same person?” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“Some well-disguised falsehoods so cleverly simulate truth that it were ill-advised not to be deceived by them.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“We can forgive people who bore us, but never those whom we bore.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“Laziness with all its indolence is often the most absolute sovereign; it encroaches upon all the plans and acts of our lives, and, little by little, saps and destroys our passions and our virtues.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“We flatter ourselves that we quit our vices; in reality our vices quit us.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“Vices are as often component parts of virtues as poisons are of healing potions; shrewdness combines and blends them to relieve the ills of life.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“Many would never have fallen in love, had they never heard the term.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“Judged by its consequences, love is more akin to hate than to affection.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“The Philosophers’ scorn of wealth was but their secret ambition to exalt their merit above fortune by deriding those blessings which Fate denied them. It was a ruse to shield them from the sordidness of poverty, and a subterfuge to attain that distinction which they could not achieve by wealth.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“Why lie when the truth is that the truth jumps out at you anyway?” – Gary Lutz, “I Was in Kilter with Him a Little”
“When you are no good at what you do, it does you no good to triumph at whatever you might come home to, either.” – Gary Lutz, “I Was in Kilter with Him a Little”
“Had we no faults, we should not take such pleasure in discovering them in others.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“It takes a better man to bear good luck than bad.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (trans. John Heard)
“What at first doesn’t sit right might eventually be made to stand at least to reason.” – Gary Lutz, “Years of Age”
“Lord knows what he does that I don’t know and Im to be slooching around down in the kitchen to get his lordship his breakfast while hes rolled up like a mummy will I indeed did you ever see me running id just like to see myself at it show them attention and they treat you like dirt I don’t care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they don’t know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt had a mother to look after them” – James Joyce, Ulysses
“People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.” – James Joyce, Ulysses
“Sleep reveals the worst side of everyone, children perhaps excepted.” – James Joyce, Ulysses
“Random processes have no memory, no guarantee. You can watch those around you eliminated and you yourself go untouched. It’s a certain kind of torture.” – Benjamin Kessler, “One in Eight”
“Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.” – James Joyce, Ulysses
“Plain and loved, loved for ever, they say. Ugly: no woman thinks she is. Love, lie and be handsome for tomorrow we die.” – James Joyce, Ulysses
“How can people aim guns at each other? Sometimes they go off.” – James Joyce, Ulysses
“Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.” – James Joyce, Ulysses
“Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, and androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.” – James Joyce, Ulysses
“Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?” – James Joyce, Ulysses