"Moliere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... safer, of course, are such friendships, where disparities of years or circumstances put the idea of love out of the question. Middle life has rarely the advantage youth and age have. Moliere's old housekeeper was a great help to his genius; and Monaigne's philosophy takes both a gentler and loftier character of wisdom from the date in which he finds, in Marie de Gournay, an adopted daughter, 'certainly beloved by me,' says the Horace of essayists, with more than paternal ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... energetic taxation. Yet, if that should happen to fail, what was to be the resource? Simply to fine and to amerce—i.e. more intense taxation. So, in Moliere's Malade Imaginaire, the only remedy is "Saignare et Purgare." But lavemens had been known to fail. What was to be done in that case? What is to be done? shrieks the Macaronic chorus—Why, of course, "Purgare et ensuita purgare." To the present government of India, this organ ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... distinction, painting scenes from the history of France in the reign of Louis XIV.; subjects drawn from what may be called the high comedy of court-life, and treated by Gerome with remarkable refinement and distinction. Among these pictures the best known are: "Moliere Breakfasting with Louis XIV.," illustrating the story of the king's rebuke to his courtiers who affected to despise the man of genius; "Pere Joseph," the priest who under the guise of humility and self-abnegation ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... Observe the least pretension on account of the rank or fortune On domestic management depends the preservation of their fortune Spirit of party can degrade the character of a nation Tastes may change The anti-Austrian party, discontented and vindictive They say you live very poorly here, Moliere True nobility, gentlemen, consists in giving proofs of it We must have obedience, and no reasoning What do young women stand in need of?—Mothers! "Would be a pity," she said, "to stop when so fairly on the road" Your swords have rusted in ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Court Memoirs of France • David Widger
... fall, on the whole, into tolerably well-marked classes, and the ordinary uncritical judgment would, probably, enable most men to state with sufficient certainty the class to which each famous name in the world's literature belongs. Aristophanes, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Swift, Fielding, Lamb, Richter, Carlyle: widely as these writers differ from each other in style and genius, the least skilled reader would hardly need to be told that the list which includes them all is a catalogue of humourists. And Cicero, Lucian, Pascal, Voltaire, Congreve, ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... authors, from Moliere down to Dickens, he never read aloud to friends any portion of the unpublished manuscript; never, except to closest intimates, spoke of the book, or tolerated inquiry about it from others. When asked as to the progress of a volume he had in hand, he used ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... his Voltairian face leered politely as he listened to Ratcliffe's reply, which showed invariable ignorance of common literature, art, and history. The climax of his triumph came one evening when Ratcliffe unluckily, tempted by some allusion to Moliere which he thought he understood, made reference to the unfortunate influence of that great man on the religious opinions of his time. Jacobi, by a flash of inspiration, divined that he had confused Moliere with Voltaire, and assuming a manner of extreme suavity, ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... the world. Extracts from L'Origine des Loix, by M. Goguet, with explanatory notes, were put into the prince's hands, to inform him of what happened in the commencement of society. These were his evening studies. In the mornings he read the French poets, Boileau, Moliere, Corneille, and Racine. Racine, as we are particularly informed, was, in the space of one year, read over a dozen times. Wretched prince! Unfortunate Racine! The abbe acknowledges, that at first these authors were ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... unction with which he pronounced this twaddle is beyond description. The pretence of conscientious feeling which he contrived to infuse into his sordid bargain-driving might have done honour to Moliere's Tartuffe. Seeing that he was determined to stick to his terms, I departed. I telegraphed to Sheldon for instructions as to whether I was to give Goodge the money he asked, and then went back to my inn, where I devoted myself for the next ten minutes to the study of a railway time-table, ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... subject; at present the excessive vagueness and shiftiness of these terms cover any amount of sophism. The pots and pans of Teniers and Van Mieris are natural; the passions and humours of Shakspeare and Moliere are natural; the angels of Fra Angelico and Luini are natural; the Sleeping Fawn and Fates of Phidias are natural; the cows and misty marshes of Cuyp and the vacillations of Hamlet are equally natural. In fact the natural means TRUTH ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... admirer of Shakespeare and Schiller, I am equally so of Voltaire, Racine and Corneille; I take equal delight in the pathos of the sentimental dramas of Kotzebue as in the admirable satire and vis comica of the unrivalled Moliere, so that on my arrival at Paris I was not violently prejudiced either for or against the French stage, but rather pre-occupied, to use a gentler term, in its favour; and I have not been at all disappointed, for I think I can pronounce it with safety the first, perhaps ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... occasionally, you find an affectation of interest in mountains, clouds, and forests, yet whenever they write from their heart, you will find an utter absence of feeling respecting anything beyond gardens and grass. Examine, for instance, the novels of Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne, the comedies of Moliere, and the writings of Johnson and Addison, and I do not think you will find a single expression of true delight in sublime nature in any one of them. Perhaps Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," in its total absence of sentiment on any subject but humanity, and ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... exactly like the father in Moliere, and I am like Scapin—'My good Scapin, my dear Scapin, find me my daughter.' Monseigneur, I am sorry for it, but Geroute could say no more; however, we will look for your daughter, and rescue her from ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... variety of its action: in the fine open-air atmosphere of the scenes, the sense of the stir of life they convey: most of all, in an indescribable manliness or humanness which bespeaks the true comic force—something of that same comic view that one detects in Shakspere and Moliere and Cervantes. It means an open-eyed acceptance of life, a realization of its seriousness yet with the will to take it with a smile: a large tolerancy which forbids the view conventional or parochial or aristocratic—in brief, the view limited. There ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... the Choice Spirits from Tom Browne to Tom Moore. Thus though confined physically to the drink that drowns kittens, I quaffed mentally, not merely the best of our own home-made, but the rich, racy, sparkling growths of France and Italy, of Germany and Spain; the champagne of Moliere, the Monte Pulciano of Boccaccio, the hock of Schiller, and the sherry of Cervantes. Depressed bodily by the fluid that damps everything, I got intellectually elevated with Milton, a little merry with Swift, or rather jolly with Rabelais, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... disturb &c 61; convert into &c 144. Adj. changed &c v.; newfangled; changeable &c 149; transitional; modifiable; alterative. Adv. mutatis mutandis [Lat.]. Int. quantum mutatus! [Lat.], Phr. a change came o'er the spirit of my dream [Byron]; nous avons change tout cela [Moliere]; tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis [Lat.]; non sum qualis eram [Lat.] [Horace]; casaque tourner [Fr.]; corpora lente augescent cito extinguuntur [Tacitus]; in statu quo ante bellum [Lat.]; still ending and beginning still [Cowper]; vox audita perit ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... desired that your victorious name should help to win a victory for this work that I inscribe to you, a work which, if some persons are to be believed, is an act of courage as well as a veracious history. If there had been journalists in the time of Moliere, who can doubt but that they, like marquises, financiers, doctors, and lawyers, would have been within the province of the writer of plays? And why should Comedy, qui castigat ridendo mores, make an exception in favor of ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... shifty spirit, the contriver, the busybody, the trusty rogue, the wonder-worker, the man in disguise, the mercurial one, lives on buoyantly in France to the age of Moliere. He is officious and efficacious in the skin of Mascarille and Ergaste and Scapin; but he tends to be a lacquey, with a reference rather to Antiquity and the Latin comedy than to the Middle Ages, as on the English stage his mere memory survives differently to a later age ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... the art of dancing attain such eminent honours in the eyes of mankind, as during the siecle dore of the latter monarch. At an epoch boasting of Moliere and Racine, Bossuet and Fenelon, Boileau and La Fontaine, Colbert and Perrault, (the fairy talisman of politics and architecture,) the court of Versailles could imagine no manifestation of regality more august, or more exquisite, than that of getting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... and cabinets of princes. Berlin resounded with the name of Eckhof, who dared to rival the French actor, and with the name of Schonemein, who dared, every time a drama of Corneille or Racine, of Moliere or Voltaire, was given in the palace theatre, to represent the same in the Council-house on the following evening. This was a good idea. Those who had been so fortunate as to witness the performance at the ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... Shaw's errors. It is much more necessary that we should recognize that, amid all his falsifications, doctrinal and jocular, he has a genuine comic sense of character. "Most French critics," M. Hamon tells us ... "declare that Bernard Shaw does depict characters. M. Remy de Gourmont writes: 'Moliere has never drawn a doctor more comically "the doctor" than Paramore, nor more characteristic figures of women than those in the same play, The Philanderer. The character-drawing is admirable.'" M. Hamon himself goes on, however, to suggest an important contrast between ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... Moliere began in The Pretentious Young Ladies to paint men and women as they are; to make living characters and existing manners the ground-work of his plays. From that time he abandoned all imitation of Italian or Spanish imbroglios ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... to give it a fine effect. In the great hall of this building the members of the Academy hold their sittings; the vestibules are adorned by marble statues of men whose intellectual powers have rendered their names renowned throughout the world, as Montesquieu, Moliere, Corneille, Racine, Sully, etc., etc. The Mazarine library is attached to this institution and contains 120,000 printed volumes besides 4,500 manuscripts. There is also under the same establishment the library of the Institute, which includes 115,000 volumes; in the ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... apprehension of its thorough humanity. Rabelais shows gleams of it in Panurge; but, in our opinion, no man ever possessed it in an equal degree with Shakspeare, except Cervantes; no man has since shown anything like an approach to it, (for Moliere's quality was comic power rather than humor,) except Sterne, Fielding, and Richter. Only Shakspeare was endowed with that healthy equilibrium of nature whose point of rest was midway between the imagination and the understanding,— that perfectly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Isle of Dreams, In vast contentment at last, With every grief done away, While Chaucer and Shakespeare wait, And Moliere hangs on his words, And Cervantes not far off Listens and smiles apart, With that incomparable drawl He ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... ninth part of a hair about entities and quiddities, nominalism and realism, free-will and necessity, with which sort of learning he used to stuff his sermons and astound his learned hearers, the bumpkins. They never doubted that it was all true, but were apt to say with the old woman in Moliere: "He speaks so well that I don't understand ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... habits than when lodged in inns. Above all, they would be removed from the sedition-mongers, who now plied them with doctrines destructive alike of loyalty and military discipline. Windham then quoted a phrase from Moliere's "Medecin malgre lui": "If I cannot make him dumb, I will make you deaf."[281] The inference was that the inability of the Cabinet to silence malcontents involved the expenditure of L1,400,000 partly in order to stop ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... imagine with what enthusiasm I accepted the proposal. To be invited to Augustine's house! Augustine, the famous actress, Augustine, the laughing representative of Moliere's comic muse, softened somewhat by the more modern poetic smile of Musset's genius—for while she acted the waiting maids at the Theatre Francais, Musset had written his comedy "Louison" at her house; Augustine Brohan, in short, in whom all Paris delighted, vaunting her wit, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... song is sung the audience pay little attention. To patriotic songs they listen respectfully. A song which breathes the glories of literature as represented by Montaigne, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Moliere is tolerated idly. But when the stage is presently cleared for a ballet the young blousards—for they are mostly young men who gather here—are all attention. What is their disgust at perceiving that the dancers are men in ancient Greek costumes, who do a sword-fight to music, with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... forgotten and neglected by every one in an incredibly short time. This somehow happens among us quite suddenly, like the shifting of the scenes on the stage. Oh, it's not at all the same as with Pushkin, Gogol, Moliere, Voltaire, all those great men who really had a new original word to say! It's true, too, that these talented gentlemen of the middling sort in the decline of their venerable years usually write themselves out in the most pitiful way, though they ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... cripple swears and rages; but the man born blind, ravished by the wonders of the world, breaks forth in praise to God. The higher Morality naturally selected types of character for satire or commendation. It is easy to perceive how such a comic art as that of Moliere lay in germ in this species of the mediaeval drama. At a late period examples are found of the historical Morality. The pathetic l'Empereur qui tua son Neveu exhibits in its action and its stormy emotion something of tragic power. The advent of the pseudo-classical ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... to progress, fleshy, fall, and some others; it has changed the meaning of some, as in freshet; and it has clung to what I suspect to have been the broad Norman pronunciation of e (which Moliere puts into the mouth of his rustics) in such words as sarvant, parfect, vartoo, and the like. It maintains something of the French sound of a also in words like ch[)a]mber, d[)a]nger (though the latter had certainly begun to take its present sound so early as ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... alone; her maid of honor had just read aloud one of Moliere's biting, satirical comedies, and received leave of absence for a few hours. The princess had also dismissed her chamberlain till dinner, and he had left the castle; only two pages waited in the anteroom, which was separated ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... when he comes in, and he tries to make himself agreeable to her in the matter of these little optional civilities. It has the most charming effect upon all domestic life, and we find a curious allusion to the politeness observed by French sons towards their mothers and fathers in one of Moliere's comedies, where a prodigal son observes to his father, who comes to denounce him, "Pray, sir, take a chair," says Prodigal; "you could scold me so much more at your ease ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... the most judicial-minded of modern critics calls it, "the best novel in the world beyond all comparison." It is its varied humour, ranging from broad farce to comedy as subtle as Shakespeare's or Moliere's that has naturalised it in every country where there are readers, and made it a classic in every language that has ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... as this may seem, it was deliberately decided upon, and one pleasant day Mitchell and George and I loaded all our scenery into a wagon and drove away across the prairie to our first "stand" very much as Moliere did in his youth, leaving the ladies to follow (in the grandeur of hired ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... guide's story of the previous evening, nothing but Stampa's death or Bower's flight could prevent it. But the woman from the Wellington Theater, how had she come to know of their feud? He was almost tempted to quote the only line of Moliere ever heard beyond the shores ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... Arrive in Mull. Addison's Remarks on Italy. Addison not much conversant with Italian literature. The French masters of the art of accommodating literature. Their Ana. Racine. Corneille. Moliere. Fenelon. Voltaire. Bossuet. Massillon. Bourdaloue. Virgil's description of the entrance into hell, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... Moliere, when once travelling through Auvergne, was taken very ill at a distance from any place where he could procure respectable medical aid. It was proposed to him to send for a celebrated physician at Clermont. ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... but that they are necessary to the distinctions; after which the oi polloi are enrolled as they can find interest. Something very like an admission of this is contained in an inscription on the statue of Moliere, which stands in the vestibule of the hall of the Academy, which frankly says, "Though we are not necessary to your glory, you are necessary to ours." He was excluded from the forty, by intrigue, on account of his profession being that of a ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... are brought on only to talk wit; for, to tell you the truth, sir, I have very little, if any, wit in this play. No, sir, this is a play consisting of humour, nature, and simplicity. It is written, sir, in the exact and true spirit of Moliere: and this I will say for it, that, except about a dozen, or a score or so, there is not one impure joke in it. But come, clear the stage, and draw the back scene! Mr Fustian, if you please to sit ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... This gentleman, who passed his life among persons of the highest distinction, was perfectly well acquainted with their lives and their follies, and painted them with the strongest pencil, and in the truest colours. He has drawn a misanthrope or man-hater, in imitation of that of Moliere. All Wycherley's strokes are stronger and bolder than those of our misanthrope, but then they are less delicate, and the rules of decorum are not so well observed in this play. The English writer has corrected the only defect that is in Moliere's comedy, the thinness of the ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... Elizabethan mask to the serenity of "Comus" and Tasso, and the terror of "Agamemnon" and "Macbeth;" at its range of expression—from, the full-toned Greek and English Iambic to the plain but sparkling prose of Moliere, and from that again to the intricate harmonies of Calderon, Goethe, and Shelley; with its use of all voices, from vociferous mob to melodious daughters of Ocean, and its command of all colour, from the gloom of Medea to the splendour of Marlowe's Helen,—it is a small matter to remember the ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... refuge in rooms which he occupied in the Rue Richelieu; these rooms adjoining the Theatre Francais, were on the first floor of a house which, like M. Grevy's residence, had an exit into the Rue Fontaine Moliere. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... the name of Ausonius. Now in later history we find every important French cycle tending to be followed by one in England: as Chaucer followed Jean de Meung; Shakespeare, Ronsard and the Pleyade; Dryden and Pope, Moliere and Racine; Wordsworth and Shelley, the Revolution. And we have seen China wake in 420; and we have noted, in the first of these lectures, the strange fact that whenever China 'gets busy,' we see a sort of reflexion of it among the Celts of the west. And we shall come presently to ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... little town, beautifully situated, surrounded by woods and lakes. Holberg, Denmark's Moliere, founded here an academy for the sons of the nobles. The poets Hauch and Ingemann were appointed professors here. The ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... malice, and Tristram Shandy, wonderful as that is too, is not without tinges of self-consciousness; and neither malice nor self-consciousness belongs to the greater gods of buffoonery. Cervantes and Moliere, those great geniuses of finest temper, still have none of the reckless buffoonery of such scenes as that between Prince Henry and the drawer, or the mad extravagances of the Merry Wives; still less of the wild topsy-turvy ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Feb. 12. R. Strauss's orchestral suite from "Der Buerger als Edelman" (opera based on Moliere's play "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme") given by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with Alfred de ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... fail if you can manage it. No successful person, perhaps, was ever, in the strict sense, a plagiarist, though charges of plagiary are always brought against everybody, from Virgil to Milton, from Scott to Moliere, who attains success. When you are accused of being a plagiarist, and shewn up in double columns, you may be pretty sure that all this counsel has been wasted on you, and that you have failed to fail, after all. Otherwise nobody would envy and malign you, and garble your book, and print quotations ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... provincial classes who received their expressions from books and the theatre; such authors as Corneille, etc., were studied and their poetic licenses introduced into spoken language. These follies, pictured by Moliere, naturally afforded much amusement in cultured circles where every event of the day was discussed, from the vital affairs of the government to the aesthetic interests of ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... Voltaire averred that the Mask was the son of Anne of Austria and Mazarin, an elder brother of Louis XIV. Changes were rung on this note: the Mask was the actual King, Louis XIV. was a bastard. Others held that he was James, Duke of Monmouth—or Moliere! In 1770 Heiss identified him with Mattioli, the Mantuan intriguer, and especially after the appearance of the book by Roux Fazaillac, in 1801, that was the ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... Before Ibsen, prose had been but a serving-maid to verse; and no great dramatist had ever put forward the prose conception of the drama. Shakespeare and the Elizabethans had used prose as an escape or a side-issue, for variety, or for the heightening of verse. Moliere had used prose as the best makeshift for verse, because he was not himself a good craftsman in the art. And, along with the verse, and necessarily dependent upon it, there was the poetic, the romantic quality in drama. Think of those dramatists who seem to have least kinship with poetry; think, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Monsieur Jourdain, in Moliere's comedy, who expressed such surprise at finding that he had been talking prose for forty years without knowing it, was no more amazed than would Mere Mouchard have been had you announced to her that she was a logician; or that her husband's daily occupations in the bright little court-yard ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... his domains a servile imitation of the stiff parks of Versailles,—the days of powdered wigs and long cues,—when French ballet-dancers gave the tone, and French actors strutted on every stage,—when Boileau was the great canon of criticism, and Racine and Moliere perpetuated in tragedy and comedy a pseudo-classicism. They are far, those times when Frederick the Great wrote French at which Voltaire laughed, and could find no better occupation for his leisure hours at Sans-Souci than the discussion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... rejected him. It was us if Lauzun, after having played fast-and-loose with that eldest daughter of France who was afterwards his wife, had been flouted by some milliner's apprentice, or made light of by an obscure little soubrette in Moliere's troop of comedians. He had neither forgotten nor forgiven this slight; and mingled with that blind unreasoning passion, which he had striven in vain to conquer, there was an ever-present sense of anger ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Moliere was always in love with his wife, notwithstanding her legerete. What makes me think the tradition that Celimene was Mademoiselle[1] Moliere true, is that Moliere was certainly in love with Celimene. She is made as engaging as possible, and her worst faults do not rise above foibles. Her satire ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... us a beautifully bound set of French classics, and we read Voltaire one day, and La Bruyere the next, and Pascal, and Fontenelle, and Moliere, and Fenelon, and the sermons of Bossuet, and since I have been seventeen the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld. Grandmamma dislikes Jean Jacques; she says he helped the Revolution, and she is all for the ancien regime. But in all these books ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... assure him that the word "dessert," with which other handbills made too free, was in this case no charter to hoodwink the public. Loaves of six pounds' weight, cut in four quarters, made good the promise of "bread at discretion." Such was the plenty of the establishment, that Moliere would have celebrated it if it had been in existence in his day, so comically appropriate ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... recurrence: it forced itself through his guard in "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" In Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts to a veritable obsession. And what else is there in Balzac, Goethe, Swift, Moliere, Turgenev, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Romain Rolland, Anatole France? Or in the Zola of "L'Assomoir," "Germinal," "La Debacle," the whole Rougon-Macquart series? (The Zola of "Les Quatres Evangiles," and particularly of "Fecondite," turned meliorist ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... work during the first hours after awakening in the morning, all these symptoms, or any part of them, show that you have before you a candidate of the disease known as bloating of the stomach or the gout. According to the wise enumeration of Moliere, who was evidently prompted by Renaudot, such a person begins with bradypepsia (slow digestion), then suffers from dyspepsia (bad digestion), afterward from apepsia (indigestion), and later lyentery (a lax or diarrhea in which food ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... those step-ladders folding into a chair which you sometimes see in libraries, he examined the topmost shelves but without result. He took down in turn Macaulay's History of England, a handsome edition of the works of Swift, and a set of Moliere without getting any nearer the ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... observer of society, a satirist, and a painter of types and characters of modern life, Emile Augier ranks among the greatest French dramatists of this century. Critics consider him in the line of direct descent from Moliere and Beaumarchais. His collected works ('Theatre Complet') number twenty-seven plays, of which nine are in verse. Eight of these were written with a literary partner. Three are now called classics: 'Le Gendre de M. Poirier' (M. Poirier's Son-in-Law), 'L'Aventuriere' (The Adventuress), ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... remarkable gift for bringing out the characteristics of the persons with whom she had any intercourse. This Pagello, thanks to his adventure with her, has become in the eyes of the world a personage as comic as one of Moliere's characters. ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... which is unintelligible to the many drunken blackguards with Irish names who make their nationality an excuse for their vices and their worthlessness, there is no flattery of the Irish; she writes about the Irish as Moliere wrote about the French, having ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... have no objection,—but wouldn't it lower one's dignity? No, no, Moliere used to read his plays to his servants, so I believe all's regular.—Come, sir, begin. ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds
... hardly rise to a style. Whoever has tried to read a play of Scribe will understand from this why Sainte-Beuve affirms of him that he is utterly devoid of the faculty of style (denue de la faculte du style). Contrast with Scribe his fellow-countryman, the great Moliere. Thence, Joubert says, "Many of our poets having written in prose, ordinary style has received from them a brilliancy and audacities which it would not have had without them. Perhaps, too, some prose writers, who were born poets without being born versifiers, have contributed to adorn our language, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... French-English kind. The historical and other literature that is thus opened up to you enables you to live in another world, with a point of view impossible to one who reads for pleasure only in his own tongue. To take two instances: Moliere is a complement to Shakespeare, and the man who knows his Moliere as he does his Shakespeare has made a propitious beginning in that study of human character which must be understood if he desires to write a history that shall gain readers. ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... York's house to see the new play, called "The Man is the Master:" [A comedy, by Sir Wm. Davenant, taken from Moliere's "Joddelet."] where the house was, it being not one o'clock, very full. By and by the King came; and we sat just under him, so that I durst not turn my back all the play. The most of the mirth was sorry, poor stuffe, of eating of sack posset ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... into the gay mosaic that adorns the portico of the new public library in Cooper Park. There, absurdly represented in an austere black cassock, he stands in the following frieze of great figures: Dante, Whitman, Moliere, Gutenberg, Tyndale, Washington, Penn, Columbus, Moses, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Longfellow and Palestrina. I believe that there was some rumpus as to whether Walt should be included; but, anyway, ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... were appointed to amuse the two emperors in the intervals of business. The representation of Cinna was the first of a series of master-pieces of the French stage. The emperor forbade comedies, saying that the Germans did not understand Moliere. ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... surrounded by a throng of servants. First came the valet de chambre, who was expected to know a little of everything, from shaving and wig-making to skill in country sports, and had as much experience in all town matters as a servant out of Terence or Moliere. Last came the negro slave, who waited on my lord or my lady, with the silver collar ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... few lines, more valuable than many volumes, J.B. Say has already remarked that there are two ways of removing the disorder introduced by hypocrisy into an honorable family; to reform Tartuffe, or sharpen the wits of Orgon. Moliere, that great painter of human life, seems constantly to have had in view the second process as ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... vogue.—"Unique competitor of the Roman Fabricius," writes the branch club at Marseilles to him; "immortal defender of popular rights," says the Jacobin crew of Bourges.[31110] One of two portraits of him in the exhibition of 1791 bears the inscription: "The Incorruptible." At the Moliere Theatre a drama of the day represents him as launching the thunderbolts of his logic and virtue at Rohan and Conde. On his way, at Bapaume, the patriots of the place, the National Guard on the road and the authorities, come in a body to honor the great man. The town of Arras is illuminated ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... fiction. In early days couched in verse. Civilisation prefers prose. Fiction, from the earlier ages, intended to convey Moral Instruction. Opinion of Aristotle defended against that of Plato. Morality in mediaeval Romance. Criticism of Mr. Frederic Harrison. Opinion of Moliere. Yet French novels usually immoral, and why. Remarks on Popery. To be avoided. Morality of Richardson and of Sir Walter Scott. Impropriety re-introduced by Charlotte Bronte. Unwillingness of Lecturer to dwell on this Topic. The ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... catastrophe has proved a stumbling-block to all that have dealt with the subject. The Spaniards of Molina's day may not have minded the clumsy deus ex machina, but later writers have been able to make nothing of it. In Moliere's play, for instance, the grotesque statue is absurdly inapposite, for his Don Juan is a wit and a cynic, a courtier of Louis XIV., with whose sins avenging gods are out of all proportion. Love for him is an intellectual exercise and a pastime. 'Constancy,' he says, 'is ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... the oftenest are not always those that we admire the most; we choose and we revisit them for many and various reasons, as we choose and revisit human friends. One or two of Scott's novels, Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne, "The Egoist," and the "Vicomte de Bragelonne," form the inner circle of my intimates. Behind these comes a good troop of dear acquaintances; "The Pilgrim's Progress" in the front rank, "The Bible in Spain" not far behind. There are besides a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as connected with our political institutions. This led to a long discussion of the latter subject, but as the same views are expressed in Mr. D.'s article on Law, I shall pass it over. [2] I differed from him in regard to the French comedies, especially those of Moliere; however, he allowed that they contain genuine humor, but they are confined to the exhibition of one ridiculous point in the character, instead of giving us the ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... vociferated. "He does not understand Shakespeare;" and was consequently shouldered into the lobby. "I'll prove it to you," said the critic to the doorkeeper. "Prove what, sir?" "That he does not understand Shakespeare." This was Moliere's housemaid with a vengeance. ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... three celebrated ancients, I venture to oppose singly the matchless Moliere, as the most consummate master of comedy that former or latter ages have produced. He was not content with painting obvious and common characters, but set himself closely to examine the numberless varieties of human nature: he soon discovered every difference, however minute; ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... sympathy with hotel-porters and waiters, and think them unduly longsuffering at times. As to Mary, the exemplary maid of the hotel alluded to, she can hold her own in repartee with any of the visitors. She is a distinct character, and Moliere could have made a "type" of her. She has no sinecure of a situation, and, after eleven at night, when the last supper is over, she has to polish the knives for the morrow's breakfast. She is young, slim, and active, and wears a string of red corals round her neck. The place is not frequented ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Comedy is nothing but the natural language, on which the poet has failed to employ his skill to refine and smoothe it down, while apparently he seems the more careful to give an accurate imitation of it: it is that prose which Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme has been speaking his whole lifetime without ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... had modelled his court very much on the plan of that of Louis XIV., which he had admired for its gaiety and spirit. Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Boileau, were encouraged by le Grand Monarque. Wycherley and Dryden were attracted by Charles to celebrate the festivities, and to amuse the great and the gay. In various points De Grammont found a resemblance. The queen-consort, Catherine of Braganza, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... that Rogers caught the mould of his blank verse from the copy rather than from the model. In the matter of style—as Flaubert has said—the second-bests are often the better teachers. More is to be learned from La Fontaine and Gautier than from Moliere ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... catoucha, that catoucha which was so soon to be followed by her famous Japanese schottische, and later still by her celebrated Peruvian minuet. Voltaire wrote a lot, but he didn't mention her; Jean Jacques Rousseau scribbled hours, but never so much as referred to her; even Moliere was so reticent on the subject of her undoubted charms that no single word about her can be found in any ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... the tender harmonies of poetry and the graces of language to their highest possible perfection. These men taught the nation to think, to feel, and to express itself. It was a curious stroke of destiny that made Moliere the contemporary of Corneille and Racine. Of him I will venture to say that he was the legislator of life's amenities; of his other merits it is ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... libertines of both sexes, who, as a punishment, we suppose, for their depravity, are condemned to talk nothing but prose. But, as soon as we meet with people who speak in verse, we know that we are in society which would have enraptured the Cathos and Madelon of Moliere, in society for which Oroondates would have too little of the lover, and Clelia too ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... practices by which keen and restless spirits have too often avenged themselves for the humiliation of dependence. The public voice loudly accused many nonjurors of requiting the hospitality of their benefactors with villany as black as that of the hypocrite depicted in the masterpiece of Moliere. Indeed, when Cibber undertook to adapt that noble comedy to the English stage, he made his Tartuffe a nonjuror: and Johnson, who cannot be supposed to have been prejudiced against the nonjurors, frankly owned that Cibber had done them ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... our language. An American will perhaps consider himself to be as little like an Englishman as he is like a Frenchman. But he reads Shakspeare through the medium of his own vernacular, and has to undergo the penance of a foreign tongue before he can understand Moliere. He separates himself from England in politics and perhaps in affection; but he cannot separate himself from England in mental culture. It may be suggested that an Englishman has the same advantages as regards America; and it is true that he is obtaining much of such advantage. ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... spoke French the only departure from the accent of the Parisian was that nuance of difference arising from the mere accidental circumstance of one having learned his French in Paris and the other in Boston. The French give much praise to Moliere for having changed the pronunciation of a great many French words; but his most successful efforts in that direction were far surpassed by the Boston young man. When he had finished his remarks a French gentleman sitting beside me ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... by the judiciary with a frown, by the other spectators with a murmur of applause, and by the beautiful daughter of the house of Mancini with one of those bewitching smiles which have been celebrated in the sonnets of Benserade, Corneille, Moliere, St. Evremont, and ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... His motto was as he wrote a page "une feuille lue aujourd'hui, oubliee demain." Therefore, he gave his copies to the compositors without rereading them. Concerning the correctness of his writings, his biographer writes: "Like Carlyle, Shelly, Bossuet, Mirabeau and Moliere, the editor of La Sentinelle perpetrated many a small sin against the rules of grammar and certainly paid but a halting attention to the nice distinctions of punctuation. He very often did not know where to end a paragraph and begin another. On the whole, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... a farce founded by David Garrick on Moliere's "Le Mariage Force," and produced on the 23d of ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... not S. Alfio a medical man? Why do you call it a miracle when a medical man cures his patient? Have you been reading the plays of Moliere?" ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... Moliere said that reasoning banished reason. It is possible also that the progress toward perfection we are so proud of is only a pretentious imperfection. Duty seems now to be more negative than positive; it means lessening evil rather than actual good; it is a generous discontent, but ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... l'Enclos whose brilliant mentality and intellectual genius formed the minds, the souls, the genius, of such master minds as Saint-Evremond, La Rouchefoucauld, Moliere, Scarron, La Fontaine, Fontenelle, and a host of others in literature and fine arts; the Great Conde, de Grammont, de Sevigne, and the flower of the chivalry of France, in war, politics, and diplomacy. Even Richelieu was not unaffected ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... modern plays, as I have said, are based on a study of life as it is, while the figures of the older comedies are frankly conventional. Nowhere in Regnard is there a situation equal in comic power to that in the final act of the Reveillon—a situation Moliere would have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... his books his eyes began to roll, In pleasing memory of all he stole; How here he sip'd, how there he plunder'd snug, And suck'd all o'er like an industrious bug. Here lay poor Fletcher's half-eat scenes, and here The frippery of crucify'd Moliere; There hapless Shakspeare, yet of Tibbald sore, Wish'd he had blotted for himself before. The rest on outside merit but presume, Or serve (like other fools) to fill a room; Such with their shelves as due proportion hold, Or their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... be said, I daresay, that overmuch scruple about our propositions and the evidence for them will reduce men, especially the young, to the intellectual condition of the great philosopher, Marphurius, in Moliere's comedy. Marphurius rebukes Sganarelle for saying he had come into the room;—'What you should say is, that it seems I am come into the room.' Instead of the downright affirmations and burly negations so becoming to Britons, he would bring down all our propositions to ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... poet, a gratified smile pervading his dusky features. "But I must tell you of this comedy—it will be a satirical picture (in the style of Moliere, only sharper) of Anglo-Jewish Society. The Rev. Elkan Benjamin, with his four mistresses, they will all be there, and Gideon, the Man-of-the-Earth, M.P.,—ah, it will be terrible. If I could only get them to see it performed, they ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... moment and I am content. But, my dear, I have less patience than love. I almost wish to tear in pieces the woman who can go everywhere, and whose society is sought out by men and women alike. What profound thought lies in the line of Moliere: ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... prohibited books. Among the works now excluded, Humboldt's Cosmos, Shakspeare, Goldsmith, Heeren's Historical Treatises, Ovid, Lucian, Lucretius, Sophocles, Suetonius, Paul de Kock, Victor Hugo, E. Girardin, G. Sand, Lamartine, Valery's L'Italie, Goethe, Schiller, Thiers, A. Dumas, Moliere, all the German philosophers, and Henry Stephens's ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... a monologue at once dramatic and philosophical. Its arguments, like those of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, are part truth, part sophistry. The poem is prefaced by a motto from Moliere's Don Juan, in which Donna Elvira suggests to her husband, with a bitter irony, the defence he ought to make for himself. Don Juan did not take the hint. Browning has done so. The genesis of the poem and the special form it has assumed are further explained by the following ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... This will remind the reader of Moliere's avowal in speaking of wit:—"C'est mon bien, et je le prends partout ou ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... susceptibilities, held it in supreme contempt, raved at it from the stage and platform, and the public, amazed at his cleverness, received him as the rude philosopher who looked a genius, talked like a whirlwind, said that he was greater than Shakespeare, said he was the Moliere of the twentieth century, and posed until it ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... unpleasant countenance; but a slight deformity and a certain feebleness of constitution rendering him unfit for the army, he was early destined for the church. He had studied among the Jesuits at the college of Clermont with Moliere, and his father had obtained for him the richest benefices, and demanded a cardinal's hat. While waiting for this hat dignity, Armand de Bourbon was living at the Hotel de Conde, partly an ecclesiastic, ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Pourceaugnac', acted on October 6, 1669, is nothing but a farce. But Moliere excels in farce as well as in higher comedy, and 'Monsieur de Pourceaugnac' is one of the best of its kind. The attacks upon the doctors of the time are not exaggerated. Moliere acted the part of ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... he knew Kleber to be more capable than any other of executing the plans he had formed; and Bonaparte was not the man to sacrifice the interests of policy to personal resentment. It is certainly true that he then put into practice that charming phrase of Moliere's—"I pardon you, but you shall pay me ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... of audacity and change without which no literature can be saved from petrifaction. All through its history the Academy has been timid and out of date. The result has been that some of the very greatest of French writers—including Moliere, Diderot, and Flaubert—have remained outside it; while all the most fruitful developments in French literary theory have come about only after a bitter and desperate resistance on its part. On the whole, perhaps the most important function performed by the Academy has been a more ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... and vitally an uneducated one. It was headed, in literary power, by Wordsworth; but the first pure example of its mind and manner of Art, as opposed to the erudite and artificial schools, will be found, so far as I know, in Moliere's song: j'aime mieux ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... as much to assist the medical man as his patient." Lectures (London, 1832), p. 14.] Opium is believed in, and quinine, and "rum," using that expressive monosyllable to mean all alcoholic cordials. If Moliere were writing now, instead of saignare, purgare, and the other, he would be more like to say, Stimulare, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist) |
