Gabriel Chevallier Quotes

#1. There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race of men with the sensation of their own ephemeral insignificance and drives them mad.

Gabriel Chevallier

#2. Love is a transaction, at least of emotions in the rarest cases: you love to get something in return.

Gabriel Chevallier

#3. Men are stupid and ignorant. That is why they suffer. Instead of thinking, they believe all that they are told, all that they are taught. They choose their lords and masters without judging them, with a fatal taste for slavery.

Gabriel Chevallier

#4. The Church needs a firm hierarchy and is forced to distrust such of her underlings as show a tendency to become too holy.

Gabriel Chevallier

#5. During several centuries Clochemerle, far from the cities and trade routes, had lived in stillness and isolation. But now, at last, the clamour of the great world was crossing the invisible barrier, bringing doubts, temptations, and discontents.

Gabriel Chevallier

#6. More than anything I am afraid of fear itself overwhelming me. One must use any bit of folly to control it.

Gabriel Chevallier

#7. God? Come off it, the heavens are empty, as empty as a corpse. There's nothing in the sky but shells and all the other murderous devices made by men . . .

Gabriel Chevallier

#8. She was one of those women who are usually referred to in the past tense, of whom one says: 'She had a certain freshness and bloom about her,' and whose freshness and bloom passed unnoticed even when she still had them.

Gabriel Chevallier

#9. Women all have the same female pretentions and even the most virtuous among them like to convince themselves that they can tempt a man.

Gabriel Chevallier

#10. Men are sheep. Which is why armies and wars are possible. They die victims of their stupid docility.

Gabriel Chevallier

#11. I had been astonished to find myself in the middle of the war yet not be able to find it, unable to accept that in fact the war consisted precisely of this stasis.

Gabriel Chevallier

#12. Men's opinions are based on the size of their bank balance. To have or not to have, as Shakespeare would say.' 'Before

Gabriel Chevallier

#13. So, in order to be courageous, I now have a fairly simple means at my disposal: to accept death.

Gabriel Chevallier

#14. Men were snoring, twitching and whimpering, struggling with nightmares less terrible than reality.

Gabriel Chevallier

#15. At Clochemerle, the greater number of the men put up with their wives, and the great majority of the women with their husbands. If this hardly amounted to adoration, in the majority of homes at any rate the men and women found each other very nearly endurable.

Gabriel Chevallier

#16. ...the schoolmaster was one of those men for whom virtuous indignation was a necessity.

Gabriel Chevallier

#17. The desire for carnal possession quickly cools, whereas the desire to own land never quits the heart of man.

Gabriel Chevallier

#18. There is nothing in human affairs that is a true subject for ridicule. Beneath comedy lies the ferment of tragedy; the farcical is but a cloak for coming catastrophe.

Gabriel Chevallier

#19. Once again was it proved that the designs of Providence are impenetrable and that the sinner, climbing out of the pit of his filthiness, may feel himself touched by grace.

Gabriel Chevallier

#20. In short, the war got off to a pretty good start, with the help of chaos.

Gabriel Chevallier

#21. The law, as manipulated by clever and highly respected rascals, still remains the best avenue for a career of honourable and leisurely plunder.

Gabriel Chevallier

#22. It was as though the world had had a fresh coat of paint, and every heart acquired a store of illusions that made the burden of life less hard to bear.

Gabriel Chevallier

#23. Victorious troops are those who kill more, and here we were the victims. This put the finishing touch to our demoralisation. The soldiers had lost conviction long ago. Now they lost confidence.

Gabriel Chevallier