Luc de Clapiers - Men Quotes

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Men crowd into honorable careers without other vocation than their vanity, or at best their love of fame.

Luc de Clapiers
Mediocre men sometimes fear great office, and when they do not aim at it, or when they refuse it, all that is to be concluded is that they are aware of their mediocrity.

Luc de Clapiers
The greatest evil that fortune can bring to men is to endow them with feeble resources and yet to make them ambitious.

Luc de Clapiers
Men dissimulate their dearest, most constant, and most virtuous inclination from weakness and a fear of being condemned.

Luc de Clapiers
There is nothing that fear or hope does not make men believe.

Luc de Clapiers
Servitude debases men to the point where they end up liking it.

Luc de Clapiers
Men are not to be judged by what they do not know, but by what they know, and by the manner in which they know it.

Luc de Clapiers
Great men in teaching weak men to reflect have set them on the road to error.

Luc de Clapiers
Most men grow old in a little groove of notions which they have not originated: perhaps there are fewer crooked minds than barren ones.

Luc de Clapiers
Men despise great projects when they do not feel themselves capable of great successes.

Luc de Clapiers
The maxim that men are not to be praised before their death was invented by envy and too lightly adopted by philosophers.

Luc de Clapiers
The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambitions.

Luc de Clapiers
As soon as an opinion becomes common it is sufficient reason for men to abandon it and to uphold the opposite opinion until that in its turn grows old, and they require to distinguish themselves by other things. Thus if they attain their goal in some art or science, we must expect them soon to cast it aside to acquire some fresh fame, and this is partly the reason why the most splendid ages degenerate so quickly, and, scarcely emerged from barbarism, plunge into it again.

Luc de Clapiers
The generality of men are so bound within the sphere of their circumstances that they have not even the courage to get out of them through their ideas, and if we see a few whom, in a way, speculation over great things makes incapable of mean ones, we find still more with whom the practice of small things takes away the feeling for great ones.

Luc de Clapiers
If a man is endowed with a noble and courageous soul, if he is painstaking, proud, ambitious, without meanness, of a profound a deep-seated intelligence, I dare assert that he lacks nothing to be neglected by the great and men in high office, who fear, more than other men, those whom they cannot dominate.

Luc de Clapiers
It is unjust to exact that men shall do out of deference to our advice what they have no desire to do for themselves.

Luc de Clapiers
You can purchase the mind of Pascal for a crown. Pleasures even cheaper are sold to those who give themselves up to them. It is only luxuries and objects of caprice that are rare and difficult to obtain; unfortunately they are the only things that touch the curiosity and taste of ordinary men.

Luc de Clapiers
Superficial knowledge … is hurtful to those who possess true genius; for it necessarily draws them away from their main object, wastes their industry over details and subjects foreign to their needs and natural talent, and lastly does not serve, as they flatter themselves, to prove the breadth of their mind. In all ages there have been men of very moderate intelligence who knew much, and so on the contrary, men of the highest intelligence who knew very little. Ignorance is not lack of intelligence, nor knowledge a proof of genius.

Luc de Clapiers
Great men undertake great things because they are great, and fools because they think them easy.

Luc de Clapiers
It cannot be a vice in men to be sensible of their strength.

Luc de Clapiers
The moderation of great men only sets a limit to their vices. The moderation of weak men is mediocrity.

Luc de Clapiers
The falsest of all philosophies is that which, under the pretext of delivering men from the embarrassment of their passions, counsels idleness and the abandonment and neglect of themselves.

Luc de Clapiers