Joseph de Maistre Quotes

It is not the mediocrity of women’s education which makes their weakness; it is their weakness which necessarily causes their mediocrity.

In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.

Christianity was preached by ignorant men and believed by servants, and that is why it resembles nothing ever known.

Every time that a man who is not an absolute fool presents you with aquestion he considers very problematic after giving it careful thought,distrust those quick answers that come to the mind of someone who hasconsidered it only briefly or not at all. These answers are usuallysimplistic views lacking in consistency, which explain nothing, or which donot bear examination.

Without doubt, God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. God directs angels, men, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things, but each according to its nature: and man having been created free, he is led freely.

If there was no moral evil upon earth, there would be no physical evil.

We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place.

Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.

In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve.

It can even come about that a created will cancels out, not perhaps the exertion, but the result of divine action; for in this sense, God himself has told us that God wishes things which do not happen because man does not wish them! Thus the rights of men are immense, and his greatest misfortune is to be unaware of them.

In the works of man, everything is as poor as its author; vision is confined, means are limited, scope is restricted, movements are labored, and results are humdrum.

What a miserable world!–trouble if we love, and trouble if we do not love.