1061 – “A friend loves you for your intelligence, a mistress for your charm, but your family’s love is unreasoning; you were born into it and are of its flesh and blood. Nevertheless it can irritate you more than any group of people in the world.”

-André Maurois

I wish you all a Merry Christmas, may your families not irritate you much!

1057 – “Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde.”

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”

-Voltaire

990 – “Pour accomplir de grandes choses il ne suffit pas d’agir, il faut rêver; il ne suffit pas de calculer, il faut croire.”

“To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.”

-Anatole France

717 – “On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

– The Fox in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella The Little Prince

715 – “La grandeur des actions humaines se mesure à l’inspiration qui les fait naître. Heureux celui qui porte en soi un Dieu, un idéal de la beauté et qui lui obéit: idéal de l’art, idéal de la science, idéal de la patrie, idéal des vertus de l’Évangile! Ce sont là les sources vives des grandes pensées et des grandes actions. Toutes s’éclairent des reflets de l’infini.”

“The greatness of human actions is measured by the inspiration that it brings. Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal of beauty and obeys it: an ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of country, ideal virtues of the Gospel! These are the wellsprings of great thoughts and great actions. All reflections illuminate infinity.”

–Louis Pasteur

Advertisement

140 – “Sans doute, c’est par l’amour que l’éternité peut être comprise; il confond toutes les notions du temps; il efface les idées de commencement et de fin; on croit avoir toujours aimé l’objet qu’on aime; tant il est difficile de concevoir qu’on ait pu vivre sans lui!”

“Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end: we fancy that we have always possessed what we love, so difficult is it to imagine how we could have lived without it” – Translated by Isabel Hill

– Germaine de Staël

108 – “La vie est à moitié dépensée avant que l’on sache ce que la vie est.”

“Life is half spent before one knows what life is.”

– French Proverb

80 – “L’univers est une espece de livre, dont on n’a lu que la premiere page quand on n’a vu que son Pays.”

“The universe is a sort of book, whose first page one has read when one has seen only one’s own country.”

– Louis-Charles Fougeret de Monbron