"Tartufe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sharply defined, and too obviously meant to contract the Poet into the Lecturer—the Fiction into the Homily. The delight in Shylock is not less vivid for the Humanity it latently but profoundly inculcates; the healthful merriment of the Tartufe is not less enjoyed for the exposure of the Hypocrisy it denounces. We need not demand from Shakespeare or from Moliere other morality than that which Genius unconsciously throws around it—the natural light which it reflects; but if some great ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... most sincere when he is most insincere, and most truthful when he lies best. A little self-consciousness of hypocrisy is a corrupting thing, much of it completely incompatible with the most successful careerism. Tartuffe is always applauded by the world when he plays Hamlet, if he really believes in himself as Hamlet. And, as all he has to do, if he is at all talented, is to look into his glass and see himself in the part, he ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... little children to apples at the stall at the corner. And the day before yesterday, when he was coming and brought me the Moliere, he stopped and gave money to a beggar, and how charmingly, sure, he reads the French! I agree with him though about Tartuffe, though 'tis so wonderfully clever and lively, that a mere villain and hypocrite is a figure too mean to be made the chief of a great piece. Iago, Mr. George said, is near as great a villain; but then he is not the first character of the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ritual cannibalism were daily events, Quetzalcoatl was credited with commuting human sacrifices for blood drawn from the bodies of the religious. In this one matter even the most conservative creeds and the faiths most opposed to change sometimes say with Tartuffe:— ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... A pearl or diamond necklace or a blushing bouquet excuses the liberal allowance of undisguised nature. We expect from the fine lady in her brocades and laces a generosity of display which we should reprimand with the virtuous severity of Tartuffe if ventured upon by the waiting-maid in her calicoes. So the poet reveals himself under the protection of his imaginative and melodious phrases,—the flowers and jewels of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... "Tartuffe, or the Impostor," is perhaps the most celebrated of all Moliere's plays. Scarcely comedy, scarcely tragedy, it partakes of both characters. Like tragedy, serious in purpose, it has a happy ending like comedy. Pity and terror are absent; or, if not quite absent, these sentiments are present ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... is a man, and thus sensually inclined; who employs certain means to subdue his passions and to become a 'whited sepulchre,' but who gives way all the more to them when he imagines that he can do so with impunity." Tartuffe, who ought to be bound to Orgon by the strongest ties of gratitude, allows the son to be turned out of the house by his father, because the latter will not believe the accusations brought against the hypocrite—tries to seduce his benefactor's wife, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various |
