The Age of Louis XIV: The Story of Civilization, Volume VIII

by Will Durant

we shall rely on the Great Powers not to destroy our subject before it destroys us.

voices moaning in the wilderness.

The most famous of French kings was only one-quarter French. He was half Spanish by his mother, Anne of Austria; he was one-quarter Italian by his grandmother Marie de Médicis.

“has in him the stuff to make four kings and an honorable man.”

“He was by disposition prudent, moderate, discreet, the master of his movements and his tongue.”

“It seems to me,” he told his son, “that we should be at once humble for ourselves and proud for the place we hold.”

But every satire is a half-truth;

“Every time I fill a vacant post,” said Louis, “I make a hundred people discontented, and one ungrateful.”

Probably it is social, not biological, heredity that makes civilization.

“She knows how to love,” he said; “it would be a pleasure to be loved by her.”

It had taken him almost half a century to discover that to be loved is worth monogamy.

THE historian, like the journalist, tends to lose the normal background of an age in the dramatic foreground of his picture,

The marvelous myths were the people’s poetry;

It was the Letters that gave the word “casuistry” its connotation of specious subtleties defending wrong actions or ideas.

Morally man is a mystery. All kinds of wickedness appear or lie hidden in him.

For all belief, even in practical matters, is a form of will, a direction of attention and desire.”

All wars are civil wars, since all men are brothers; “each one owes infinitely more to the human race—which is the great country—than to the particular country in which he was born.”

of an unconverted lion.

Wealth is necessary to great art, but wealth is disgraceful and art is unpleasant when they flourish at the expense of widespread poverty and debasing superstition; for the beautiful cannot long be divorced from the good.

It is one of the outstanding features of modern history that the theater overcame this resistance.

The struggles and absurdities of life had developed in him a vein of melancholy, and he found it tragical to be always comical.

we must now burn what we have adored, and adore what we have burned.”

Molière was designed to suffer tragedy, not to play it.

I will not wear horns if I can help it.

Many an author writes better under pressure than at leisure; leisure relaxes the mind, urgency stimulates it.

“It is better to die according to the rules,” cries Dr. Bahys, “than to recover contrary to them.”

“We reason with one another; he prescribes remedies; I omit to take them, and I recover.”

Mon Dieu, des moeurs du temps mettons-nous moins en peine, Et faisons un peu grâce à la nature humaine; Ne l’examinons point dans la grande rigueur, Et voyons ses défauts avec quelque douceur. Il faut, parmi le monde, une vertu traitable; A force de sagesse on peut être blâmable; La parfaite raison fuit toute extrémité Et veut que l’on soit sage avec sobriété. Cette grande raideur des vertus des vieux âges Heurte trop notre siècle et les communs usages; Elle veut aux mortels trop de perfection: Il faut fléchir au temps sans obstination, Et c’est une folie à nulle autre seconde De vouloir se mêler de corriger le monde. J’observe, comme vous, cent choses tous les jours, Qui pourraient mieux aller, prenant un autre cours; Mais quoi qu’à chaque pas je puisse voir paraître, En courroux, comme vous, on ne me voit point être;

Je prends tout doucement les hommes comme ils sont, J’accoutume mon âme à souffrir ce qu’ils font, Et je crois qu’à la cour, de même qu’à la ville, Mon flegme est philosophe autant que votre bile.II,

We must only keep ourselves quiet. Nature herself, when we let her alone, will gently deliver herself from the disorder she’s fallen into. ‘Tis our ingratitude, ‘tis our impatience, that spoils all; and almost all men die of their medicines, not of their diseases.

“I think it a very grievous punishment, in the liberal arts, to display oneself to fools, and to expose our compositions to the barbarous judgment of the stupid.”

So it is the philosophy in his plays, as well as their humor and pungent satire, that makes almost every literate Frenchman read Molière.

But overemphasis is in the blood of satire, and dramas seldom make their point without it.

a dictionary, like history and government, is a composition of forces between the weight of the many and the power of the few.

But it is still not given to poets to be happy, unless beauty proves a joy forever, and praise encounters no discordant voice.

“Death has sent in its bill.”

He kept the modern drama at a level that only Shakespeare and Corneille had reached, and that no one but Goethe has touched again.

the aristocracy is too interested in the art of life to spare time for the life of art.

“I use animals,” La Fontaine said, “to instruct men.”

His nurse was confident of his eternal salvation, for, she said, “he was so simple that God would not have the courage to damn him.”42

“Make haste slowly; without losing courage, put your work on the anvil twenty times . . . Add occasionally, omit often.”

“Love those who criticize you, and, bowing to reason, correct yourself without complaint.”

A warrior must exaggerate his share of the truth.

the best book is that which omits most of its original form;

sex depletes while parentage fulfills.

This is the reverse of a more usual compliment; we are often advised, perhaps recklessly, to write as we speak.

“Hypocrisy is a sort of homage which vice pays to virtue.”

“True love is like ghosts—something that everyone talks of but scarcely anyone has seen”;

we need as little concern ourselves with the gods as they seem to do with us.

we may join the French in acclaiming the age of Louis XIV as standing with Periclean Greece, Augustan Rome, Renaissance Italy, and Elizabethan-Jacobean England among the peaks in the faltering trajectory of mankind.