Top 249 Quotes & Sayings by Moliere - Page 4

I will maintain it before the whole world.

Grammar, which can govern even Kings.

In order to prove a friend to one's guests, frugality must reign in one's meals; and, according to an ancient saying, one must eat to live, not live to eat.

She is laughing up her sleeve at you.

What! Would you make no distinction between hypocrisy and devotion? Would you give them the same names, and respect the mask as you do the face? Would you equate artifice and sincerity? Confound appearance with truth? Regard the phantom as the very person? Value counterfeit as cash?

Show some mercy to this chair which has stretched out its arms to you for so long; please satisfy its desire to embrace you!

What a terrible thing to be a great lord, yet a wicked man.

Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.

I would like to be like my father and all the rest of my ancestors who never married.

Even Rome cannot grant us a dispensation from death.

Isn't the greatest rule of all the rules simply to please?

Ah, there are no longer any children!

The public scandal is what constitutes the offence: sins sinned in secret are no sins at all.

I recover my property wherever I find it.

The envious will die, but envy never. [Fr., Les envieux mourront, mais non jamais l'envie.]

Gold gives to the ugliest thing a certain charming air, For that without it were else a miserable affair.

My fair one, let us swear an eternal friendship.

One cannot but mistrust a prospect of felicity: one must enjoy it before one can believe in it.

Consistency is only suitable for ridicule.

Grammar, which knows how to lord it over kings, and with high hands makes them obey its laws.

You think you can marry for your own pleasure, friend?

There is no protection against slander.

We are all mortals, and each is for himself.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

New-born desires, after all, have inexplicable charms, and all the pleasure of love is in variety.

To create a public scandal is what's wicked; to sin in private is not a sin.

The smallest errors are always the best.

And knowing money is a root of evil, in Christian charity, he'd take away whatever things may hinder your salvation.

Of all human foibles love of living is the most powerful.

Tobacco is the passion of honest men and he who lives without tobacco is not worthy of living.

A laudation in Greek is of marvellous efficacy on the title-page of a book.

Nothing can be fairer, or more noble, than the holy fervor of true zeal.

Debts are nowadays like children begot with pleasure, but brought forth in pain.

Sometimes I feel something akin to rage At the corrupted morals of this age!

It is a long road from conception to completion.

Assassination's the fastest way.

I will not leave you until I have seen you hanged.

When we are understood, we always speak well, and then all your fine diction serves no purpose.

The great ambition of women is to inspire love.

There's a sort of decency among the dead, a remarkable discretion: you never find them making any complaint against the doctor who killed them!

Anyone may be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly.

Cover that bosom that I must not see: souls are wounded by such things.

But it is not reason that governs love.

It may cost me twenty thousand francs; but for twenty thousand francs, I will have the right to rail against the iniquity of humanity, and to devote to it my eternal hatred.

I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the others.

One can be well-bred and write bad poetry

You never see the old austerity That was the essence of civility; Young people hereabouts, unbridled, now Just want.

I might, by chance, write something just as shoddy; But then I wouldn't show it to everybody.

The road is long fro the project to its completion.

I maintain, in truth, That with a smile we should instruct our youth, Be very gentle when we have to blame, And not put them in fear of virtue's name.

We live under a prince who is an enemy to fraud, a prince whose eyes penetrate into the heart, and whom all the art of impostors can't deceive.

Birth is nothing without virtue, and we have no claim to share in the glory of our ancestors unless we endeavor to resemble them.

[Dom Juan] believes neither in Heaven, nor the saints, nor God, nor the Werewolf.

Birth is nothing where virtue is not

A husband is a plaster that cures all the ills of girlhood.

Nearly all men die of their medicines, not of their diseases.

Everything that's prose isn't verse and everything that isn't verse is prose. Now you see what it is to be a scholar!

He makes his cook his merit, and the world visits his dinners and not him.

Heaven forbids, it is true, certain gratifications, but there are ways and means of compounding such matters.

Sharing with Jupiter is never a dishonor.