Moliere Quotes

The true touchstone of wit is the impromptu.

When there is enough to eat for eight, there is plenty for ten.

All is wholesome in the absence of excess.

Deference and intimacy live far apart.

Esteem must be founded on some sort of preference. Bestow it on everybody and it ceases to have any meaning at all.

Virtue is the first title of nobility.

Stay awhile that we may make an end the sooner.

True, Heaven prohibits certain pleasures; but one can generally negotiate a compromise.

The envious will die, but envy never. [Fr., Les envieux mourront, mais non jamais l'envie.]

Birth is nothing where virtue is not

Debts are nowadays like children begot with pleasure, but brought forth in pain.

Tobacco is the passion of honest men and he who lives without tobacco is not worthy of living.

There's a sort of decency among the dead, a remarkable discretion: you never find them making any complaint against the doctor who killed them!

I maintain, in truth, That with a smile we should instruct our youth, Be very gentle when we have to blame, And not put them in fear of virtue's name.

It's true Heaven forbids some pleasures, but a compromise can usually be found.

But it is not reason that governs love.

Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.

I recover my property wherever I find it.

You never see the old austerity That was the essence of civility; Young people hereabouts, unbridled, now Just want.

Oh, how fine it is to know a thing or two.

Anyone may be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly.

No matter what Aristotle and the Philosophers say, nothing is equal to tobacco; it's the passion of the well-bred, and he who lives without tobacco lives a life not worth living.

There is no praise to bear the sort that you put in your pocket.

It is a long road from conception to completion.

You are my peace, my solace, my salvation.

Cultivated people should be superior to any consideration so sordid as a mercenary interest.

There is something inexpressibly charming in falling in love and, surely, the whole pleasure lies in the fact that love isn't lasting.

Cover that bosom that I must not see: souls are wounded by such things.

Show some mercy to this chair which has stretched out its arms to you for so long; please satisfy its desire to embrace you!

Gold gives to the ugliest thing a certain charming air, For that without it were else a miserable affair.

Nothing can be fairer, or more noble, than the holy fervor of true zeal.

[Dom Juan] believes neither in Heaven, nor the saints, nor God, nor the Werewolf.

As the purpose of comedy is to correct the vices of men, I see no reason why anyone should be exempt.

Sometimes I feel something akin to rage At the corrupted morals of this age!

One cannot but mistrust a prospect of felicity: one must enjoy it before one can believe in it.

And knowing money is a root of evil, in Christian charity, he'd take away whatever things may hinder your salvation.

Its as if you think you'd never find Reason and the Sacred intertwined

Wives rarely fuss about their beauty To guarantee their mate's affection.

It is madness beyond compare To try to reform the world.

It's an odd job, making decent people laugh.

What a terrible thing to be a great lord, yet a wicked man.

Isn't the greatest rule of all the rules simply to please?

Of all human foibles love of living is the most powerful.

Oh, I may be devout, but I am human all the same.

I would like to be like my father and all the rest of my ancestors who never married.

I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the others.

The public scandal is what constitutes the offence: sins sinned in secret are no sins at all.

Nearly all men die of their medicines, not of their diseases.

Reasoning is the pastime of my whole household, and all this reasoning has driven out Reason.

Age brings about everything; but it is not the time, Madam, as we know, to be a prude at twenty.