The Wisdom of Frogs

In a small attempt to counter the Francophobia that is nowadays so rampant in much of the English-speaking world, this website offers the below list of quotes from great French writers. Hopefully readers will find something useful in them:

• The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up – Valery

• All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation. Inspiration comes of working every day – Baudelaire

• Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough – Flaubert

• We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us – Proust

• My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened – Montaigne

• Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game – Voltaire

• Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy – Voltaire

• We never live; we are always in the expectation of living . They only live who dare – Voltaire

• Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise - La Rochefoucauld

• We should not be upset that others hide the truth from us, when we hide it so often from ourselves - La Rochefoucauld

• If we had no faults, we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others - La Rochefoucauld

• We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others - La Rochefoucauld

• If we judge love by the majority of its results, it resembles hatred more than friendship - La Rochefoucauld

• The truest way to be deceived is to think oneself superior to others - La Rochefoucauld

• Who lives without folly is not so wise as he thinks - La Rochefoucauld

• Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit - La Rochefoucauld

• We hardly find any persons of good sense save those who agree with us - La Rochefoucauld

• Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed: everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect never desire more of it than they already have - Descartes

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