François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand

Plus notre coeur est tumultueux et bruyant, plus le calme et le silence nous attirent.

chance could not have formed the world, because there could have been but one single favorable chance against innumerable impossibilities

șansa nu ar fi putut forma lumea, deoarece nu ar fi putut exista decât o singură șansă favorabilă împotriva nenumăratelor imposibilități

Thus, in my rendering, Chateaubriand may occasionally sound like Cioran (who called him “a sonorous Pascal”), or Baudelaire (who called him “one of the surest and rarest masters”), or Proust (who compared his distinctive sentences to the barn owl’s distinctive cry), or Sebald (who so seamlessly integrated passages of the Memoirs into the penultimate chapter of The Rings of Saturn).

In living literature no person is a competent judge but of works written in his own language. I have expressed my opinion concerning a number of English writers; it is very possible that I may be mistaken, that my admiration and my censure may be equally misplaced, and that my conclusions may appear impertinent and ridiculous on the other side of the Channel.

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

As a precaution against boredom, my bitter enemy, it would have suited me to be a great, but unknown artist, using my talent only for the benefit of my solitude.

Purgatory surpasses heaven and hell in poetry, because it represents a future and the others do not.

Life is spent hovering round our tomb. Our various sicknesses are but the winds which carry us more or less near to the haven. … Death is our friend, nevertheless we do not recognise it as such, because it presents itself to us under a mask, and that mask inspires us with terror.

Although quick to become bored by everything, I am always patient with the smallest details: I am endowed with the fortitude to face every impediment and, even when I grow weary of my object, my persistence is always greater than my boredom. I have never abandoned any project worth the trouble of completing. There are many things in my life that I have pursued for fifteen or twenty years with as much ardor on the last day as the first. My supple intelligence has extended itself to secondary matters also. I was deft at chess, skilled at billiards, hunting, and fencing, and I was a passable draughtsman. I would have sung well, too, if my voice had been trained. All this, combined with my unusual education and my experience as a soldier and a traveler, explains why I have never been a pedant, nor ever displayed the dull conceit, awkwardness, and slovenliness of the literary men of the last century, nor the arrogant self-assurance, the vain and envious braggadocio, of the new authors.

There are only two true things: intelligent religion and youthful love, which is to say the future and the present. The rest is not worth the trouble

Taken collectively, the people are a poet, at once author and ardent actor of the part they play, or the part they are made to play. Their excesses come not so much from instinctual or inborn cruelty as from the unpredictable delirium of a crowd intoxicated by spectacles,

Every institution goes through three stages — utility, privilege, and abuse.

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

What useless pageantry! No party ever believes in converting their opponent: neither liberty capitulating nor power abasing itself ever obtains mercy from its enemies.

Aussitôt qu'une pensée vraie est entrée dans notre esprit, elle jette une lumière qui nous fait voir une foule d'autres objets que nous n'apercevions pas auparavant.