François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand Quotes

L’arbre tombe feuille à feuille : si les hommes contemplaient chaque matin ce qu’ils ont perdu la veille, ils s’apercevraient bien de leur pauvreté.

My mother, Apolline de Bedée, endowed with great wit and a prodigious imagination, was formed by reading Fénelon, Racine, and Madame de Sévigné. She was nourished on anecdotes of the Court of Louis XIV and knew all of Cyrus by heart. A small woman of large features, dark-haired and ugly, her elegant manners and lively disposition were at odds with my father’s rigidity and calm. Loving society as much as he loved solitude, as exuberant and animated as he was expressionless and cold, she possessed no taste not antagonistic to the tastes of her husband.

Spring, in Brittany, is milder than spring in Paris, and bursts into flower three weeks earlier. The five birds that herald its appearance — the swallow, the oriole, the cuckoo, the quail, and the nightingale — arrive with the breezes that refuge in the bays of the Armorican peninsula.[28] The earth is covered over with daisies, pansies, jonquils, daffodils, hyacinths, buttercups, and anemones, like the wastelands around San Giovanni of Laterano and the Holy Cross of Jerusalem in Rome. The clearings are feathered with tall and elegant ferns; the fields of gorse and broom blaze with flowers that one may take at first glance for golden butterflies. The hedges, along which strawberries, raspberries, and violets grow, are adorned with hawthorn, honeysuckle, and brambles whose brown, curving shoots burst forth with magnificent fruits and leaves. All the world teems with bees and birds; hives and nests interrupt the child’s every footstep. In certain sheltered spots, the myrtle and the rose-bay flourish in the open air, as in Greece; figs ripen, as in Provence; and every apple tree, bursting with carmine flowers, looks like the big bouquet of a village bride.

These Memoirs have been composed at different dates and in different countries. For this reason, I have been obliged to add some prefatory passages which describe the places that I had before my eyes and the feelings that were in my heart when the thread of my narrative was resumed. The changing forms of my life are thus intermingled. It has sometimes happened that, in my moments of prosperity, I have had to speak of times when I was poor, and in my days of tribulation, to retrace days when I was happy. My childhood entering into my old age, the gravity of experience weighing on the lightness of youth, the rays of my sun mingling and merging together, from its dawn to its dusk, have produced in my stories a kind of confusion, or, if you will, a kind of ineffable unity.

Aristocracy has three successive stages: the age of superiority, the age of privilege, and the age of vanity. Once through with the first, it degenerates into the second, and dies out in the third.

There is no power but in conviction.

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labour 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.

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

Could Washington the Dictator be anything other than a rustic, prodding his oxen with a goad and steadily gripping the handle of his plow? But when I did go to him with my letter of introduction, I discovered the simplicity of an old Roman. A small house, which looked just the same as the neighboring houses, was the palace of the President of the United States.

On n'est point un homme supérieur parce qu'on aperçoit le monde sous un jour odieux. On ne hait les hommes et la vie que faute de voir assez loin.

One is not, my dear sir, a superior man merely because one sees the world in an odious light. One only hates mankind and life itself through failing to look deeply enough.

La mort est belle, elle est notre amie : néanmoins, nous ne la reconnaissons pas, parce qu'elle se présente à nous masquée et que son masque nous épouvante.

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.

The original writer is not he who refrains from imitating others, but he who can be imitated by none.

How small man is on this little atom where he dies! But how great his intelligence! He knows when the face of the stars must be masked in darkness, when the comets will return after thousands of years, he who lasts only an instant! A microscopic insect lost in a fold of the heavenly robe, the orbs cannot hide from him a single one of their movements in the depth of space. What destinies will those stars, new to us, light? Is their revelation bound up with some new phase of humanity? You will know, race to be born; I know not, and I am departing.