François Rabelais Quotes

Would you damn your precious soul?

What do you say? cried they; do you call it Entelechy or Endelechy? Truly, truly, sweet cousins, quoth Panurge, we are a silly sort of grout-headed lobcocks, an't please you; be so kind as to forgive us if we chance to knock words out of joint. As for anything else, we are downright honest fellows and true hearts.

I go to see a Greater Perhaps.

Necessity has no law.

Here enter not vile bigots, hypocrites, Externally devoted apes, base snites, Puffed-up, wry-necked beasts, worse than the Huns, Or Ostrogoths, forerunners of baboons: Cursed snakes, dissembled varlets, seeming sancts, Slipshod caffards, beggars pretending wants, Fat chuffcats, smell-feast knockers, doltish gulls, Out-strouting cluster-fists, contentious bulls, Fomenters of divisions and debates, Elsewhere, not here, make sale of your deceits.

He did not care a button for it.

Et guerre faicte sans bonne provision d'argent, n'a qu'un souspirail de vigueur. Les nerfz des batailles sont les pecunes.

Advice to Readers

Good friends who come to read this book,
Strip yourselves first of affectation;
Do not assume a pained, shocked look,
For it contains no foul infection,
Yet teaches you no great perfection,
But lessons in the mirthful art,
The only subject for my heart.
When I see grief consume and rot
You, mirth's my theme and tears are not,
For laughter is man's proper lot.

I am going to seek a great perhaps; draw a curtain, the farce is played out.

Revenons à nos moutons

Readers, friends, if you turn these pages
Put your prejudice aside,
For, really, there's nothing here that's outrageous,
Nothing sick, or bad — or contagious.
Not that I sit here glowing with pride
For my book: all you'll find is laughter:
That's all the glory my heart is after,
Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I'd rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous.

It is enough to fright you out of your seven senses.

But because, as the wise man Solomon saith, Wisdom entereth not into a malicious mind, and that knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul, it behoveth thee to serve, to love, to fear God, and on him to cast all thy thoughts and all thy hope, and by faith formed in charity to cleave unto him, so that thou mayst never be separated from him by thy sins. Suspect the abuses of the world. Set not thy heart upon vanity, for this life is transitory, but the Word of the Lord endureth for ever. Be serviceable to all thy neighbours, and love them as thyself. Reverence thy preceptors: shun the conversation of those whom thou desirest not to resemble, and receive not in vain the graces which God hath bestowed upon thee.

You are Christians of the best edition, all picked and culled.

El hombre no val más de lo que él mismo estima.