Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles Quotes

With great employments and vulgar maxims, one is always restless and uneasy : it is not places, but reason, that removes anxiety from the mind. (p. 170).

We spoil the dispositions nature has given to women ; we neglect their education, fill their minds with nothing solid, and destine them solely to please, and to please only by their graces or their vices.

The time of Christians is the price with which they purchase eternity. (p. 121).

Birth bestows less of honour than it demands; and to boast of ancestry is but to praise the merit of others. (p. 139).

We are not indeed obliged always to speak what we think, but we must always think what we speak. (p. 149).

The pleasures of the world are deceitful; they promise more than they give. They trouble us in seeking them, they do not satisfy us when possessing them and they make us despair in losing them. (p. 172).

To form a complete judgment of any one, we ought to have seen him acting the last part. (p. 126).

Would you be esteemed? live with persons that are estimable. (p. 57).

The love of esteem is the life and soul of society; it unites us to one another : I want your approbation, you stand in need of mine. By forsaking the converse of men, we forsake the virtues necessary for society; for when one is alone, one is apt to grow negligent; the world forces you to have a guard over yourself. (p. 155).

The most necessary disposition to relish pleasures is to know how to be without them. (p. 160).

A man that does not aim at raising to himself a great name, will never perform any great actions. And such as go carelessly on in the road of their professions suffer all the fatigues, without acquiring either the honour or recompense that naturally attend it. (p. 137).

To live in perpetual employment, is to travel rapidly through life. Tranquility lengthens our existence. (p. 136).

The world steals us from ourselves and solitude restores us. The world is composed of a herd, which are ever flying from themselves. (p. 136).

One of the duties of old-age, is the management of time. The less that remains to us, the more valuable we ought to consider it. (p. 121).

The owning of faults is no hard matter for persons that find a fund within themselves to mend them. (p. 153).