Michelet Quotes & Sayings

Our esteem is apt to be given where we know the least. — Jules Michelet

The Historian and the Man of Science alike may be said to traffic with the dead. Cuvier has imparted flesh and motion and appetites to the defunct Megatherium, whilst the living ears of M.M. Michelet and Renan, of Mr. Carlyle and the Brothers Grimm, have heard the bloodless cries of the vanished and given them voices. I myself, with the aid of the imagination, have worked a little in that line, have ventriloquised, have lent my voice to, and mixt my life with, those past voices and lives whose resuscitation in our own lives as warnings, as examples, as the life of the past persisting in us, is the business of every thinking man and woman. — A.S. Byatt

You are one of the forces of nature. — Jules Michelet

Each year, it is necessary to respire, to take breath again, to revive ourselves at the great living sources that forever keep their eternal freshness. Where can we find them if not at the cradle of our race, on the sacred summits from where descend the Indus and the Ganges ... ? — Jules Michelet

It was one thing to talk of using technology to topple the authority of the aristocracy and the Church, but who or what would replace them? Diderot and the French revolutionaries had assumed it would be "the people." But as the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet once wryly observed, "The people, in its highest ideal, is difficult to find in the people." As — Mark Kurlansky

Achieving a goal is nothing. The getting there is everything. — Jules Michelet

That is why all romantics are anti-Voltairean, even Michelet, whose political fervor ought to have made him stand aligned with Voltaire; and that is why, on the other hand, all the minds which accept the world and recognize its irony and indifference are Voltairean. — Voltaire

At its starting point in India, the birthplace of races and religions, the womb of the world. — Jules Michelet

The Eleven is not a painting of History, it is History. Perhaps what Michelet saw at the end of the Flore pavilion was History in person, in eleven persons - in terror, because History is pure terror. And that terror attracts us like a magnet. Because we are men, Sir; and because men high and low, scholars and beggars, passionately love History, that is, the terrors and the massacres; they hasten from afar to contemplate them, the terrors and the massacres, under the pretext of deploring them, even of rectifying them, so they claim, the good creatures... — Pierre Michon

It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus. — Roland Barthes

Woman is the Sunday of man: not his repose only, but his joy; the salt of his life. — Jules Michelet

What manly eloquence could produce such an effect as woman's silence? — Jules Michelet

A religion that executes its obsolete sovereign must now establish the power of its new sovereign; it
closes the churches, and this leads to an endeavor to build a temple. The blood of the gods, which for a
second bespatters the confessor of Louis XVI, announces a new baptism. Joseph de Maistre qualified the
Revolution as satanic. We can see why and in what sense. Michelet, however, was closer to the truth
when he called it a purgatory. An era blindly embarks down this tunnel on an attempt to discover a new
illumination, a new happiness, and the face of the real God. But what will this new god be? — Albert Camus

- Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position? - c'est le pigeon, Joseph. Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar MacMahon. Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father's a bird, he lapped the sweet lait chaud with pink young tongue, plump bunny's face. Lap, lapin. He hopes to win in the gros lots. About the nature of women he read in Michelet. But he must send me La Vie de Jesus by M. Leo Taxil. Lent it to his friend. - C'est tordant, vous savez. Moi, je suis socialiste. Je ne crois pas en l'existence de Dieu. Faut pas le dire a mon p-re. - Il croit? - Mon pere, oui. — James Joyce

Improvement depends far less upon length of tasks and hours of application than is supposed. Children can take in but a little each day; they are like vases with a narrow neck; you may pour little or pour much, but much will not enter at a time. — Jules Michelet

What is the first part of politics? Education. The second? Education. And the third? Education. — Jules Michelet

Women are perfectly well aware that the more they seem to obey the more they rule. — Jules Michelet

He who knows how to be poor knows everything. — Jules Michelet

Great images have both a history and a prehistory; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly. Indeed, every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds special color. Consequently it is not until late in life that we really revere an image, when we discover that its roots plunge well beyond the history that is fixed in our memories. In the realm of absolute imagination, we remain young late in life. But we must lose our earthly Paradise in order to actually live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimation that transcends all passion. A poet meditating upon the life of a great poet, that is Victor-Emile Michelet meditating upon the life of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, wrote: "Alas! we have to grow old to conquer youth, to free it from its fetters and live according to its original impulse. — Gaston Bachelard

Woman is a miracle of divine contradictions — Jules Michelet

How beautifully everything is arranged by Nature; as soon as a child enters the world, it finds a mother ready to take care of it. — Jules Michelet

If you wish to ruin yourself, marry a rich wife. — Jules Michelet

The historian's first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth. — Jules Michelet

Every epoch dreams its successor. — Jules Michelet

Great hearts alone understand how much glory there is in being good. — Jules Michelet

He who would confine his thought to present time will not understand present reality. — Jules Michelet

Lastly no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this "ignoble tobagie" as Michelet calls it, spreads all over the world. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The way to gain a friend is to be one — Jules Michelet

The indifference of men, far more than their tyranny, is the torment of women. — Jules Michelet

Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flush of truth. — Jules Michelet

Fear accomplishes much in love. The husband of the Middle Ages was loved by his wife for his very severity. The bride of William the Conqueror, having been beaten by him, recognized him by this token for her lord and husband — Jules Michelet

The real, in all this efforts, is that we climb just for climbing. — Jules Michelet

Woman's happiness consists in obeying; she objects to a man who yields too much. — Jules Michelet

Love is strong in its passion; affection is powerful in its gentleness. — Jules Michelet

Animal life, sombre mystery. All nature protests against the barbarity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his inferior brethren. — Jules Michelet

Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest. All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system. — Jules Michelet