Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin]

Age brings about everything; but it is not the time, Madam, as we know, to be a prude at twenty.

One ought to look a good deal at oneself before thinking of condemning others.

New-born desires, after all, have inexplicable charms, and all the pleasure of love is in variety.

I have a heart to love all the world; and like Alexander I wish there were yet other worlds, so I could carry even further my amorous conquests.

I believe that two and two are four and that four and four are eight.

I give it to you for the love of humanity.

Birth means nothing where there is no virtue.

A nobleman who is wicked is by nature a monster.

She is a prude in her own defence ... under the specious mask of propriety, she conceals the decay of her worn-out charms.

When there is enough to eat for eight, there is plenty for ten.

Love is a great master. It teaches us to be what we never were.

Sharing with Jupiter is never a dishonor.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Outside of Paris, there is no hope for the cultured.

You think you can marry for your own pleasure, friend?

We die only once, and it's for such a long time!

I prefer a pleasant vice to an annoying virtue.

For more than forty years I've been speaking in prose without even knowing it!

Grammar, which rules even kings ...

Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous for its prey.

It's still better to be married than dead.

No matter what Aristotle and the Philosophers say, nothing is equal to tobacco; it's the passion of the well-bred, and he who lives without tobacco lives a life not worth living.

There's nothing quite like tobacco: it's the passion of decent folk, and whoever lives without tobacco doesn't deserve to live.

Ah! how annoying that the law doesn't allow a woman to change husbands just as one does shirts.

Human weakness is to desire to know what one does not want to know.

One easily bears moral reproof, but never mockery.

As the purpose of comedy is to correct the vices of men, I see no reason why anyone should be exempt.

People don't mind being mean; but they never want to be ridiculous.

It is the public scandal that offends; to sin in secret is no sin at all.

Ah! devout though I may be, I am no less a man!

I have the knack of easing scruples.

Laurent, lock up my hair shirt and lacerating whip.

Cover that bosom, which I cannot bear to see.

We live under a prince who is an enemy to fraud, a prince whose eyes penetrate into the heart, and whom all the art of impostors can't deceive.

The secret to fencing consists in two things: to give and to not receive.

This is not how nature speaks.

It may cost me twenty thousand francs; but for twenty thousand francs, I will have the right to rail against the iniquity of humanity, and to devote to it my eternal hatred.

Time has nothing to do with the matter.

The absence of the beloved, short though it may last, always lasts too long.

The ancients, sir, are the ancients, and we are the people of today.

When you model yourself on people, you should try to resemble their good sides.

To marry a fool is to be no fool.

Most people die from the remedy rather than from the illness.

Show some mercy to this chair which has stretched out its arms to you for so long; please satisfy its desire to embrace you!

Bring us the mirror, you ignorant thing, and be sure not to sully the image by the transmission of your reflection!

No matter what everybody says, ultimately these things can harm us only by the way we react to them.

Reasoning is the pastime of my whole household, and all this reasoning has driven out Reason.

I feed on good soup, not beautiful language.

Solitude terrifies the soul at twenty.