Top 43 Maistre Quotes
#1. Hen Maistre adopts Bossuet's bold idea that "the heretic is he who has personal
ideas" - in other words, ideas that have no reference to either a social or a religious tradition - he provides
the formula for the most ancient and the most modern of conformities.
Albert Camus
#2. Marx is only anti-capitalist
in so far as capitalism is out of date. Another order must be established which will demand, in the name of
history, a new conformity. As for the means, they are the same for Marx as for Maistre: political realism,
discipline, force.
Albert Camus
#3. Poor white trash quoting de Maistre and Carlyle and fancying themselves elite while they scrabbled to survive in a world where they were outstripped economically by the Chinese and intellectually by their own phones.
Ken MacLeod
#4. [M]an cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short ... there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin.
Joseph De Maistre
#5. 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.
Joseph De Maistre
#6. Every individual or national degeneration is immediately revealed by a directly proportional degradation in language.
Joseph De Maistre
#8. Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.
Joseph De Maistre
#9. Imagination, realm of enchantment!- which the most beneficent of beings bestowed upon man to console him for reality- I must quit you now.
Xavier De Maistre
#11. When I have had enough of tears and love, I turn to some poet, and set out again for a new world.
Xavier De Maistre
#14. Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing.
Joseph De Maistre
#15. The concept of number is the obvious distinction between the beast and man.
Joseph De Maistre
#17. What a miserable world!
trouble if we love, and trouble if we do not love.
Joseph De Maistre
#18. Prejudice does not mean false ideas, but only ... opinions adopted before examination.
Joseph De Maistre
#19. 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.
Joseph De Maistre
#20. 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.
Joseph De Maistre
#21. It is one of man's curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties for the pleasure of resolving them.
Joseph De Maistre
#22. Nothing is necessary except God, and nothing is less necessary than pain.
Joseph De Maistre
#23. Now, there is no such thing as 'man' in this world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I've never encountered him.
Joseph De Maistre
#24. 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.
Joseph De Maistre
#25. Genius does not seem to derive any great support from syllogisms. Its carriage is free; its manner has a touch of inspiration. We see it come, but we never see it walk.
Joseph De Maistre
#26. Women have a genius for love; men can only learn the art indifferently.
Joseph De Maistre
#28. 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.
Joseph De Maistre
#29. There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.
Joseph De Maistre
#30. All grandeur, all power, and 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.
Joseph De Maistre
#31. 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.
Joseph De Maistre
#32. 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.
Joseph De Maistre
#34. What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution.
Joseph De Maistre
#35. Christianity was preached by ignorant men and believed by servants, and that is why it resembles nothing ever known.
Joseph De Maistre
#36. 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.
Joseph De Maistre
#38. If there was no moral evil upon earth, there would be no physical evil.
Joseph De Maistre
#39. 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.
Joseph De Maistre
#40. It is not the mediocrity of women's education which makes their weakness; it is their weakness which necessarily causes their mediocrity.
Joseph De Maistre
#43. All pain is a punishment, and every punishment is inflicted for love as much as for justice.
Joseph De Maistre
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