A Quote by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

Those who have not lived in the eighteenth century, in the years before the Revolution do not know the sweetness of living and cannot imagine what it was like to have happiness in life.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century the industrial-financial revolution began.
Take up something that you know will never bring you any returns except pleasure-in other words, allow yourself to live the way brilliant eighteenth century courtesans lived. Don't be afraid of having a decorative life, even if all the decorations come from you.
Pseudo-modernists pursue individual style because they know they cannot make a name without it; but if they had lived in the eighteenth century their sole object would have been to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice, their conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, of the eccentricities of poems which really are individual.
The dance form has been a lifestyle that I was initiated to at an early age. It has been the only constant in my life, like a friend bringing happiness and pain. I cannot imagine living without it.
The degeneration of the revolution in Russia does not pass from the revolution for communism to the revolution for a developed kind of capitalism, but to a pure capitalist revo­lution. It runs in parallel with world-wide capitalist domination which, by successive steps, eliminates old feudal and Asiatic forms in various zones. While the historical situation in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused the capitalist revolution to take liberal forms, in the twentieth century it must have totalitarian and bureaucratic ones.
What makes 'The Marriage of Souls' such a wonderful book is Collins's intricate reconstruction of the late eighteenth-century world. Simplicity and philosophy are the hallmarks of eighteenth-century art and architecture. The classically pure lines look deceptively simple and unburdened by heavy symbolism or imagery.
Before science, before the eighteenth century, religion answered the questions, and so in the nineteenth century for instance there was a real jostling between science and religion over the truth and this is why Darwin was so controversial.
I'm a creature of the eighteenth century at heart: The Enlightenment and the search for happiness suit me.
Sweetness eliminates gravity and thus a man with a heavy burden of life starts feeling like floating in the air before sweetness.
Chinese people of my parents' generation who lived through the Cultural Revolution knew so much of death at such a young age, and the psychic toll those experiences left was immense. I knew the stories of the Cultural Revolution before knowing what the Cultural Revolution was.
I think our children will be living on floating cities, and they will look back on the 20th Century, when people lived in primitive governments founded in previous centuries, and they will be living on modular, sustainable, floating cities that we can't imagine now, that are based on the voluntary choice of citizens. I think we will have a marvellous world in the 21st Century.
Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way.
I remember when I was 15 or 16 years old, I couldn't imagine what life would be like past the age of 30, just because I didn't know that many men who had lived beyond their 20s.
I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.
There is a demon in technology. It was put there by man and man will have to exorcise it before technological civilization can achieve the eighteenth-century ideal of humane civilized life.
But above all, what this Congress can be remembered for is opening the way to a new American revolutiona peaceful revolution in which power was turned back to the peoplein which government at all levels was refreshed and renewed and made truly responsive. This can be a revolution as profound, as far-reaching, as exciting as that first revolution almost 200 years agoand it can mean that just 5 years from now America will enter its third century as a young nation new in spirit, with all the vigor and the freshness with which it began its first century.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!