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Reason is a historian, but the passions are actors.

— Antoine de Rivarol

La raison est historienne, mais les passions sont actrices.

Original text (French)

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Source: Maximes et pensées, anecdotes et bons mots, in Œuvres choisies (Paris: Libraire des bibliophiles, 1880), Vol. I, p. 237
Source quality: Precise citation Points to a specific work with a page, chapter, date or similar locator, so you can look it up.

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Certainty and mystery are for feeling; clarity and uncertainty for reasoning.

Of Man, His Intellectual Faculties, and His Main Ideas (1797)

Politics is like the sphinx of the fable; it devours all those who do not decipher its enigmas.

Ideas are a capital that bears interest only in the hands of talent.

All the world needs France, while England needs all the world.

De l'universalité de la langue française (1784)

A cat doesn't caress us, it caresses itself on us.

Religion unites men in the same dogmas, politics unites them in the same principles, and philosophy sends them back into the woods; it is the dissolver of society.

Language is the painting of our ideas.

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Imagination is a friend of the future.

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Topics

Mind

More quotes by Antoine de Rivarol

The absolute ruler may be a Nero, but he is sometimes a Titus or a Marcus Aurelius; the people is often Nero, but never Marcus Aurelius.

God is the highest measure of our incapacity; the universe, space itself, are not so inaccessible.

Of Man, His Intellectual Faculties, and His Main Ideas (1797)

The being that only feels does not yet think, and the being that thinks feels always.

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The man who speaks is the man who thinks out loud.

De l'universalité de la langue française (1784)

It is prose which gives sway to a language, because it is quite usual; poetry is only a luxury object.

De l'universalité de la langue française (1784)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Antoine de Rivarol (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.