François Rabelais Quotes

Corn is the sinews of war.

Si vous faîtes attention aux signes, quand donc ferez vous attention à ce qu'ils signifient?

If you pay attention to the signs, but when will you pay attention to what they signify?

Do What Thou Wilt;

because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us.

¿No es mejor y más honrado morir virtuosamente batallando que vivir huyendo villanamente?

Pourtant, affin que je face fin à ce prologue, tout ainsi comme je me donne à cent mille panerés de beaulx diables, corps et ame, trippes et boyaul, en cas que j'en mente en toute l'hystoire d'un seul mot, pareillement le feu sainct Antoine vous arde, mau de terre vous vire, le lancy, le maulubec vous trousse, la caquesangue vous viengne,

Le mau fin feu de ricqueracque,
Aussi menu que poil de vache,
Tout renforcé de vif argent,
Vous puisse entrer au fondement,

et comme Sodome et Gomorre puissiez tomber en soulphre, en feu et en abysme, en cas que vous ne croyez fermement tout ce que je vous racompteray en ceste presente Chronicque!

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

Ignorance est mère de tous les maux.

He would flay the fox, say the ape's paternoster, return to his sheep, and turn the hogs to the hay. He would beat the dogs before the lion, put the plough before the oxen, and claw where it did not itch.

Panurge stood beside the galley with an oar in his hand, not to help the herdsmen but to prevent from from somehow clambering aboard and thus escaping their death, and all the while preached to them eloquently . . . with rhetorical flourishes about the miseries of this world and the blessings of the next, affirming that those who had passed on to that place were happier than those who lived on in this vale of tears.

The Devil was sick, — the Devil a monk would be; The Devil was well, — the devil a monk was he.

So much is a man worth as he esteems himself.

And so on to the end of the chapter.

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

Pantagruel was telling me that he believed the queen had given the symbolic word used among her subjects to denote sovereign good cheer, when she said to her tabachins, A panacea.

Conheço muitos que não puderam quando deviam porque não quiseram quando podiam.