Joseph de Maistre Quotes (24 Quotes)

There is no man who desires as passionately as a Russian. If we could imprison a Russian desire beneath a fortress, that fortress would explode.

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.

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.

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

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

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

To know how to wait is the great secret of success.

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.

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.

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

I don't know what a scoundrel is like, but I know what a respectable man is like, and it's enough to make one's flesh creep.

A constitution that is made for all nations is made for none.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Every country has the government it deserves.

There is no easy method of learning difficult things. The method is to close the door, give out that you are not at home, and work.

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.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man it is horrible.

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