In France, and at the most important period of our history, Catherine de' Medici has suffered more from popular error than any oth...er woman, unless it be Brunehaut or Frédégonde; while Marie de' Medici, whose every action was prejudicial to France, has escaped the disgrace that should cover her name.... Catherine de' Medici ... saved the throne of France, she maintained [the] Royal authority under circumstances to which more than one great prince would have succumbed. Face to face with such leaders of the factions and ambitions of the houses of Guise and of Bourbon as the two Cardinals de Lorraine and the two "Balafrès," the two Princes de Condé, Queen Jeanne d'Albret, Henri IV, the Connétable de Montmorency, Calvin, the Colignys and Théodore de Bèze, she was forced to put forth the rarest fine qualities, the most essential gifts of statesmanship, under the fire of the Calvinist press.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a social respect necessary in company: you may start your own subject of conversation with modesty, taking care, however,... de ne jamais parler de cordes dans la maison d'un pendu.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both were predominantly ethical in aim and doctrine; theory of knowledge (logic) and of nature (physics) served rather as the scaf...folding rather than as an integral portion of their philosophic structure, while metaphysics, the kernel of Platonic and Aristotelian speculation, receded altogether into the background.... When we ask as to the nature of the philosophic life, the two schools give widely different answers. To the Stoic, it consists in following virtue, in obedience to an authoritative law of nature or reason; the sage, by subjugating emotion, and by detachment from the restless world of circumstance, disciplines his soul to self-sufficiency and inward independence. To the Epicurean, the good life is that of rational enjoyment of all the satisfactions which the world affords.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Et Saint Apollinaire, raide et ascétique, Vieille usine désaffectée de Dieu, tient encore... Dans ses pierres éecroulantes la forme précise de Byzance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Madame d'Estampes and Madame de Valentinois make me fear that I should be only honoured by my husband as a queen and not loved by ...him as a woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You cannot have one well-bred man without a whole society of such. They keep each other up to any high point. Especially women;Mit... requires a great many cultivated women,--saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to elegant society, in order that you have one Madame de Staël.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubio...us ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »