Joseph de Maistre Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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.

Joseph de Maistre
False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.

Joseph de Maistre
Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not. People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man.

Joseph de Maistre
There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

Joseph de Maistre
All pain is a punishment, and every punishment is inflicted for love as much as for justice.

Joseph de Maistre
We are all bound to the throne of the Supreme Being by a flexible chain which restrains without enslaving us. The most wonderful aspect of the universal scheme of things is the action of free beings under divine guidance.

Joseph de Maistre
It is one of man's curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties for the pleasure of resolving them.

Joseph de Maistre
A constitution that is made for all nations is made for none.

Joseph de Maistre
Every time that a man who is not an absolute fool presents you with a
question he considers very problematic after giving it careful thought,
distrust those quick answers that come to the mind of someone who has
considered it only briefly or not at all. These answers are usually
simplistic views lacking in consistency, which explain nothing, or which do
not bear examination.

Joseph de Maistre
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.

Joseph de Maistre
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.

Joseph de Maistre
The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death.

Joseph de Maistre
Without doubt God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. He directs angels, man, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things, but each according to its nature, and man having been created free, he is freely led. This rule is truly the eternal law and in it we must believe.

Joseph de Maistre
In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he exists unknown to me.

Joseph de Maistre
Nothing is necessary except God, and nothing is less necessary than pain.

Joseph de Maistre
Man is so muddled, so dependent on the things immediately before his eyes, that every day even the most submissive believer can be seen to risk the torments of the afterlife for the smallest pleasure.

Joseph de Maistre
War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular.... War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it.... War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.

Joseph de Maistre
Every nation has the government it deserves.

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

Joseph de Maistre
Every nation gets the government it deserves.

Joseph de Maistre
All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.

Joseph de Maistre
The error of certain women is to imagine that, to acquire distinction, they must imitate the manners of men.

Joseph de Maistre