"Moliere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rhetoric. It must be taken, therefore, as something serious in the main; and if so taken, and read by the light reflected from Mr. Whistler's more characteristically brilliant canvases, it may not improbably recall a certain phrase of Moliere's which at once passed into a proverb—"Vous etes orfevre, M. Josse." That worthy tradesman, it will be remembered, was of opinion that nothing could be so well calculated to restore a drooping young lady to mental and physical health as the ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... syllable; all of which is, again, another way of saying that it has style. And he did not need the stimulus of personal feeling to give him this energy of speech. The same gift is seen when he "communia dicit," when he is uttering some general reflection, the common wisdom of mankind. Moliere said, "Je prends mon bien ou je le trouve." Johnson might have used the same words with a slightly different meaning. He excelled all men in recoining the gold of common sense in his own mind. All the world has said "humanum est errare": but the saying is newborn when Johnson clinches ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... than the literary turn of dialogue is the thing that counts most in the theatre will be felt emphatically if we compare the mere writing of Moliere with that of his successor and imitator, Regnard. Moliere is certainly a great writer, in the sense that he expresses clearly and precisely the thing he has to say; his verse, as well as his prose, is admirably lucid and eminently speakable. But assuredly, in the sense in which ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... probably, Moliere's "Mamamouchi"; and the modern French use "Mamalue." See Savary's ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... fellows and ourselves. In proportion as these expressions are the forms of universal truths, of facts common to all nations or appreciable by all intellects, the literature which sets them forth is permanently good and true. Hence the universality and immortality of Homer, Shakspere, Cervantes, Moliere. But in proportion as these expressions are the forms of individual, peculiar truths, such as fleeting fashions or idiosyncrasies, the literature is ephemeral. Hence tragedy never grows old, for it arises from elemental experience; but comedy ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... upon him (I hope not by Leslie Stephen), so ignorant and self-sufficient that I am more wroth than ever. The old Story of 'Pope in worsted stockings'—why I could cite whole Paragraphs of as fine texture as Moliere—incapable of Epigram, the Jackanapes says of 'our excellent Crabbe'—why I could find fifty of the very best Epigrams in five minutes. But now do you care for him? 'Honour bright?' as Sheridan used to say. I don't think I ever knew a Woman who did like C., except my ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... an enthusiast is always a bore. 'Les facheux,' of Moliere are just enthusiasts. Well, sir, in one word, I was a natural philosopher—very small, but earnest; and, in due course, my studies brought me to the wonders of the human body. I studied the outlines of anatomy in books, and plates, and prepared figures; ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... headed "Les Illusions;" and a third, "La Liberte;" but neither these, nor a longer one (which I fancy introduces the names of Moliere, Rousseau, and Fenelon), ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... note with hearty pleasure and pride. But the rest was merely clever; and now that we are getting nothing great we must insist, and keep on insisting, that 'tis merely clever. But let us remember that value of the word great. Let it be kept for such names as Shakespeare and Moliere; and lesser men may be called brilliant, talented or able—anything you will but great. Consider the scenes from the supreme plays of Shakespeare and compare with them the innumerable plays now coming forth and ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... and in the Marais;—of respectable parents, of course. Think of the talent that our two countries produced about this time: Marlborough, Villars, Mandrin, Turpin, Boileau, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Moliere, Racine, Jack Sheppard, and Louis Cartouche,—all famous within the same twenty years, and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... were high and noble impulses persecuted; not there were the creations of intellect, poetry, and art contemned and oppressed. On the other hand, monarchs alone were their protectors. Shakespeare and Moliere flourished under their magnanimous protection, while Dante could not find a corner in his republican birthplace. She said that true geniuses arise at the epoch of brilliancy and power in emperors and empires, but not in the time of monstrous political apparitions and ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... should 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, ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds
... 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 ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... as absurd, or, to speak more correctly, a thousand times absurder, than if one were to speak of those grand old times when Homer and Virgil smoked their pipes together in the Mermaid Tavern, while Shakespeare and Moliere, crowned with summer roses, sipped their Falernian at their ease beneath the whispering palmwoods of the Nevsky Prospect, and discussed the details of the play they were to produce to-morrow in the crowded Colosseum, on the occasion of Napoleon's reception at ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... sting. He was continually accepting gifts of newspapers—of which there were a half a thousand or so brought aboard—with every appearance of receiving a favour. These papers he carried down to our tiny box of a room and added to his bundle. I supposed at the time he was doing all this on Moliere's principle, that one gains more popularity by accepting a favour ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... tho' a great 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 ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... 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 ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Strange position! We were the secret disciples of a monarch in a policy to which even his enemies have since done signal justice; alone with us he gave judgment on all things, foreign and domestic, yet we had no legitimate influence; often we were consulted like Laforet by Moliere, and made to feel that the hesitations of long experience were confirmed or removed by the ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... and neurologists, even up to the present day, to present glibly a formidable list of mighty men of genius as victims of epilepsy. Thus I find a well-known American alienist lately making the unqualified and positive statement that "Mahomet, Napoleon, Moliere, Handel, Paganini, Mozart, Schiller, Richelieu, Newton and Flaubert" were epileptics, while still more recently a distinguished English neurologist, declaring that "the world's history has been made by men who were either epileptics, ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... to show the frightful results which have followed this taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge; quotes the Encyclopedie, to prove that the woman who knows the alphabet has already lost a portion of her innocence; cites the opinion of Moliere, that any female who has unhappily learned anything in this line should affect ignorance, when possible; asserts that knowledge rarely makes men attractive, and females never; opines that women have no occasion to peruse Ovid's "Art of Love," since they ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... mankind does not agree, and does not know the facts. All that can be said for medical popularity is that until there is a practicable alternative to blind trust in the doctor, the truth about the doctor is so terrible that we dare not face it. Moliere saw through the doctors; but he had to call them in just the same. Napoleon had no illusions about them; but he had to die under their treatment just as much as the most credulous ignoramus that ever paid sixpence ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... sieur de Somaize, brought out his Grand Dictionnaire des Precieuses,[13] in which there are many portraits in the accepted manner. The portrait was more than a fashion at this time in France; it was the rage. It therefore invited the satirists. Moliere has a passing jest at them in his Precieuses Ridicules;[14] Charles Sorel published his Description de I'isle de la Portraiture et de la ville des Portraits; and Boileau ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... 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 periods of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... the government whether they were aware that herrings were being imported from Hamburg to Harwich. The government said no. Another member rose and asked the government whether they considered Shakespere or Moliere the greater dramatic artist. The government answered that ministers were taking this under their earnest consideration and that a report would be submitted to Parliament. Another member asked the government if they knew who won the Queen's Plate this season at Toronto. ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... without being absolved, and without suspecting that it was necessary to be absolved, from the excommunication which had been formerly fulminated against stage players; and which, as every body knows, deprived Moliere of ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... Brunetiere's illuminating study, "Jansenistes et Cartesiens" in Etudes critiques, 4me serie.] This libertinism had its philosophy, a sort of philosophy of nature, of which the most brilliant exponents were Rabelais and Moliere. The maxim, "Be true to nature," was evidently opposed sharply to the principles of the Christian religion, and it was associated with sceptical views which prevailed widely in France from the early years of the seventeenth century. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... public harangues.[6] You have hissed the tragedy of Cataline; when you shall see Phaedrus played, you will probably agree that the part of Phaedrus, in Racine, is infinitely superior to the model you have known in Euripides. I hope, also, that you will agree our Moliere surpasses your Terence. By your permission, I shall have the honour of escorting you to the opera, where you will be astonished to hear song in parts; that again is an art unknown to you.[7] Here, madam, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... is excellently represented. We have here examples of Villon, Rabelais, and Moliere, but we have specimens also of La Rochefoucauld, Regnard, Voltaire, Beaumarchais, Chamfort, Dumas, Gautier, Labiche, De Banville, Pailleron, and many others.... The book sparkles from beginning ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... been a member of either house of Congress. But if his form in marble, or his portrait upon canvas, were placed within these walls, a suitable inscription for it would be that of the statue of Moliere in the hall of the French Academy: 'Nothing was wanting to his glory; ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... soft dark eyes, and hair that just missed being black, a clear complexion and fine color, and a small line of mustache. As to manners he was really charming, and so well-read that Mr. Winthrop Adams took to him at once. He was conversant with Voltaire and Rousseau, the plays of Racine and Moliere, and the causes that had led to the French Revolution, and had been in Paris through the famous "Hundred Days." Of course he ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... Gaston Villere, in leaving Harvard College, had shut Horace and Sophocles for ever at the earliest instant possible under academic requirements, he knew the Greek and Latin names that he now saw as well as he knew those of Shakspere, Dante, Moliere, and Cervantes. These were here also; but it could not be precisely said of them, either, that they made a part of the young man's daily reading. As he surveyed the Padre's august shelves, it was with a touch of the histrionic Southern ...
— Padre Ignacio - Or The Song of Temptation • Owen Wister
... intended to produce. "Cyrano," he said, "has been maligned by Coquelin. Coquelin is a great artist, but he did not understand Cyrano. Cyrano is a dreamer, a poet; he is a martyr of thought like Tolstoi, a sacrifice to wasted, useless action, like Hamlet; he is a Moliere come too soon, a Bayard come too late, a John the Baptist of the stage, calling out in vain in the wilderness—of bricks and mortar; he is misunderstood;—an enigma, an anachronism, a premature herald, a ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... most heroic figure in Europe. Every one bowed before him, and everything seemed to be gravitating toward him as toward a central sun. Not alone nobility, but even genius put on his livery and became sycophantish, Bossuet and even Moliere, hungering for his smile, and in ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... the octosyllabic measure used with such animated effect in "The House of Fame," "Chaucer's Dream," &c. — is the sounding of the terminal "e" where it is now silent. That letter is still valid in French poetry; and Chaucer's lines can be scanned only by reading them as we would read Racine's or Moliere's. The terminal "e" played an important part in grammar; in many cases it was the sign of the infinitive — the "n" being dropped from the end; at other times it pointed the distinction between singular and plural, between adjective and adverb. The pages that follow, however, being prepared ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... reconnoissance of the slippery ground, they tremblingly venture an anecdote of Selwyn or Hood, or Beaumarchais, they are invariably driven back in confusion by the inquiry, if they remember this or that bon mot uttered at the court of Aurungzebe or of one of the early Incas! Ah! would I were Moliere ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... de 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 by ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... a great writer because, like Moliere, La Bruyere, and La Fontaine, he is always close to nature, disdaining all studied rhetorical effect and all ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... range of blue hills, at about twelve miles' distance, allured her to reverie, and bred within her thoughts not too deep for tears. The books which exercised most power over her at this period were Shakspeare, Cervantes, and Moliere—all three students of the 'natural history of man,' and inspired by fact, not fancy; reconstructing the world from materials which they collected on every side, not spinning from the desires of their own special ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... substances; but there was no explanation how all these different elements came into existence. Each appeared to be an original creation, and there was no accounting for them. But now-a-days, as the rustic physician says in Moliere's play of the "Medecin Malgre Lui," "nous avons change tout cela." Modern science has shown conclusively that every kind of chemical atom is composed of particles of one original substance which appears to pervade all space, ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... Guide to the Turf," said another. Both were wrong. And it ultimately transpired that, together with his friends' best wishes for his safe return, Lord Randolph was carrying with him complete sets of the works of Shakespeare and Moliere. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... is not literature. Some of the greatest lovers of letters who have ever lived—Dr. Johnson, for example, and Thomas de Quincey and Carlyle—have cared no more for first editions than I do for Brussels sprouts. You may love Moliere with a love surpassing your love of woman without any desire to beggar yourself in Paris by purchasing early copies of the plays. You may be perfectly content to read Walton's Lives in an edition of 1905, if there is one; and as for ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... place and hour of its birth. A knowledge of the condition of political parties in Athens in 416 B.C. adds immensely to the enjoyment of the readers of Aristophanes; the fun becomes funnier and the daring even more splendid than before. Moliere's training as an actor does affect the dramaturgic quality of his comedies. All this is demonstrable, and to the prevalent consciousness of it our generation is deeply indebted to Taine and his pupils. But before ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... the honest but uneducated tradesman of Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, whose sudden wealth lands him in ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... since you have mentioned doctors, try to avoid speaking of professional matters. They talk politics, discuss the fashions and the theatres, they tell anecdotes, they write books better than professional authors do; there is a vast difference between the doctors of to-day and those of Moliere— ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... met many of these pairs at Rome, where she writes that, by herding together and throwing away their money on worthless objects, they had acquired the title of Golden Asses, and that Goldoni adorned his dramas with "gli milordi Inglesi" in the same manner as Moliere represented his Parisian marquises (Letters, ed. Wharncliffe, London, 1893, ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... 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 ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... Commanders-in-Chief have passed from a brief glory as Solons and Caesars into failure and obscurity as closely on one another's heels as the descendants of Banquo; but Euripides and Aristophanes, Shakespeare and Moliere, Goethe and Ibsen remain fixed in ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... ourselves yet further of Sainte-Beuve's Babylonish dialect), this far outpasses the raillery of Sterne's Sentimental Journey; it might be Scarron without his grossness. Nay, I do not know but that Moliere in his lighter mood would not have said of it, as of Cyrano de Bergerac's best—'This is mine.' Richelieu himself was not more complete when he wrote to the princess waiting for him in the Palais Royal—'Stay there, my queen, to charm ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... of Moliere for the stage. His grandfather loved the theatre, and frequently carried him there. The young man lived in dissipation; the father observing it asked in anger, if his son was to be made an actor. "Would to God," replied the grandfather, "he were as good an actor as Monrose." ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... forward to enrich by contrast the serious parts of the glorious genius of Shakspeare." We never understood or imagined there was an Anacreon among the aldermen, a Chaucer in the common council, or a Moliere at the Mansion-house. We have now discovered the Peter Lauriate of the City—the poet of the Poultry. Who, in the face of the above sentence, can deny his right to these titles, if, like ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... was hailed as a great dramatic genius. But these comedies are interesting to-day chiefly from the fact that Ariosto was one of the very first of the writers of modern comedy, and was the leader of that movement in Italy and France which prepared the way for Moliere. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... feel as bilious as the best comic writer of them all, (even as Regnard himself, the next to Moliere, who has written some of the best comedies in any language, and who is supposed to have committed suicide,) and am not in spirits to continue my proposed tragedy of Sardanapalus, which I have, for some days, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... there is the sketch for a comedy, a novelette or a satire. There is hardly a sentence without its 'point', an expression without a vivid fancy. There are unrivalled niceties. The abbot of the Abbatis et eruditae colloquium is a Moliere character. It should be noticed how well Erasmus always sustains his characters and his scenes, because he sees them. In 'The woman in childbed' he never forgets for a moment that Eutrapelus is an artist. At the end of 'The game of knucklebones', when the interlocutors, ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... Audacious 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 buggies) later in ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Commander's Statue. In the familiar story of Don Juan, where the audacious rake accepts the Commander's invitation to supper. For treatments of this theme, see Moliere's play Don Juan, or Mozart's opera Don Giovanni; see also Bernard Shaw's paradoxical play, Man and Superman.... We have something else in hand, thank God, and let him knock. It is possible that Stevenson's ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... It was only for the return of this charming performer that Peter had been waiting to respond to Miriam's most ardent wish—that of spending an hour in the foyer des artistes of the great theatre. She was the person whom he knew best in the house of Moliere; he could count on her to do them the honours some night when she was in the "bill," and to make the occasion sociable. Miriam had been impatient for it—she was so convinced that her eyes would be opened in the holy of holies; but wishing as particularly as he did to participate in her impression ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. A handsome presence and a Tartarin de Tarascon disposition assured his success from the start. The medical world was then composed of the emulsion of charlatanry and science Moliere ridiculed. Success stimulated envy and jealousy. One of the richest of the older medical men set himself the job of procuring his scalp. On a trumped-up charge of stealing jewels from a dead patient—a ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... 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 reduces ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... seeing him surrounded by these female worshippers, hanging upon his lips as he discoursed to us about new readings of old truths, one was irresistibly reminded of certain scenes in Moliere's "Femmes Savantes." ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... Origin. Introduced into France from Italy. Under Henry III., IV., Louis XIII., XIV. Influence of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin. Foundation of the Academic de Danse et de Musique. The Court Ballet. Moliere. Corneille. Lalli, &c. The Theatre Ballet. The Influence of Noverre. Its introduction into and its Present Condition in England, &c. Illustrations of Mlles. de Camargo, Duvernay, Taglioni. Fanny Ellsler. Ferraris, Carlotta Grisi. Adeline ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... however, that he was rather proud of being "detained," it was proof of his power—he was dangerous outside. But his family had practically cast him off—he owed nothing to them—and the change of name fostered a mysterious noble birth, an idea that he allowed to gain currency without contradiction. Moliere had changed his name from Poquolin—and was he not really following in Moliere's footsteps, even to suffering disgrace ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... excuse her by citing the example of Moliere. Just at that moment it came to pass that, while climbing the ladder to get a book, she upset a whole shelf-row. There was a heavy crash; and Mademoiselle Prefere, being, of course, a very delicate ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... have called forth. In Walt Whitman we in America have known an American author who was an American martyr in a more literal sense than any of the men named by the great German. More than Heine, or Rousseau, or Moliere, or Byron, was Whitman a victim of the literary Philistinism of his country and times; but, fortunately for himself, his was a nature so large, tolerant, and self-sufficing that his martyrdom sat very lightly upon him. His unpopularity was rather a tonic to him than otherwise. It was ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... Titian, and Correggio, and other illustrious men will perish and pass away. "How long," said Napoleon to David, "will a picture last?" "About four or five hundred years!—a fine immortality!" The poet multiplies his works by means of a cheap material—and Homer, and Virgil, and Dante, and Tasso, and Moliere, and Milton, and Shakspeare, may bid oblivion defiance; the sculptor impresses his conceptions on metal or on marble, and expects to survive the wreck of nations and the wrongs of time; but the painter commits to perishable cloth or wood the visions of his fancy, and dies in the certain assurance ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... are by degrees reopening. In order not to shock public opinion, the programmes of their entertainments are exceedingly dull. Thus the Comedie Francaise bill of fare for yesterday was a speech, a play of Moliere's without costumes, and an ode to Liberty. I can understand closing the theatres entirely, but it seems to me absurd increasing the general gloom, by opening them in order to make the audiences wish that ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... of one of 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 end of ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... the author describes it, or even a small model of the stage for a "dramatic museum" for your school. If you have not tried this, you do not know how much it helps in seeing plays of other times, like Shakespeare's or Moliere's; and it is useful also for modern dramas. Such small stages can be used for puppet theatres as well. "The Knave of Hearts" is intended as a marionette play, and other dramas—Maeterlinck's and even Shakespeare's—have been given in this ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... these illustrious men, in itself great, was much enhanced by the still greater blaze of fame which encircled his throne, from the genius of the literary men who have given such immortal celebrity to his reign. Corneille and Racine were his tragedians; Moliere wrote his comedies; Bossuet, Fenelon, and Bourdaloue were his theologians; Massillon his preacher, Boileau his critic; Le Notre laid out his gardens; Le Brun painted his halls. Greatness had come upon France, as, in truth, it does to most other states, in all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... wife of Lord Byron; guessing intuitively his contempt for the real, she made herself as fantastic as the poetry of Manfred, and provided for his scepticism by making him a Catholic. Modeste attributed Moliere's melancholy to the women of the seventeenth century. "Why is there not some one woman," she asked herself, "loving, beautiful, and rich, ready to stand beside each man of genius and be his slave, like Lara, the mysterious page?" She had, as the reader perceives, ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... a little brain teeming with memories of the Theatres Beaumarchais, Voltaire, Moliere, Feuillet, Sardou, Sandeau, &c., which I had heard read so continually at the Dower-House amongst the Fens, the views of dramatic literature held at the Coronet appeared of the most extraordinary character. They certainly had ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... "Most modern comedies are founded on those of Menander. They revive their characters, repeat their jokes, transplant their humor; and the wit of Moliere, Shakspeare, or Sheridan is often the same that once awoke shouts of laughter on ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... retained a few words now fallen into disuse in the mother country, like to tarry, 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 Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... America has yet contributed to literature. Huxley, had he not been the greatest intellectual duellist of his age, might have been its greatest satirist. Bismarck, pursuing the gruesome trade of politics, concealed the devastating wit of a Moliere; his surviving epigrams are truly stupendous. And Beethoven, after soaring to the heights of tragedy in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, turned to the sardonic ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... such fine, such brilliant stuffs, such elegant furniture, and when are made such rich porcelains, must needs be the age of periphrase and circumlocution. We must try, therefore, to coin a new word in place of the comic expression which Moliere used; since the language of this great man, as a contemporary author has said, is too free for ladies who find gauze too thick for their garments. But people of the world know, as well as the learned, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... Virgo, black speckled with blue; to Libra, black, or dark crimson, or tawny colour; to Scorpio, brown; to Sagittarius, yellow, or a green sanguine (this is as strange a colour as the gris rouge of Moliere's L'Avare); Capricorn, black or russet, or a swarthy brown; to Aquarius, a sky-coloured blue; to Pisces, white glistening colour (like a fish just taken out of ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... itself around its victim; or like the bohun upas of Java, which diffuses death. The bright beams of hope, which cheered the possessor, and carried his vision to distant days and distant scenes of enjoyment, are all eclipsed by this pillar of darkness. Moliere the poet was endowed with an eminent genius—he was esteemed as the first wit in Europe; but his wife was faithless, and no enjoyment, or success, or honor could tranquillize his mind, and make him happy. The attractions ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... oblivion dulled the memory of the enormous mass of talk. Sir John thinks we should read Confucius, the Hindoo religious poetry, some Persian poetry, Thucydides, Tacitus, Cicero, Homer, Virgil, a little—a very little—Voltaire, Moliere, Sheridan, Locke, Berkeley, George Lewes, Hume, Shakspere, Bunyan, Spenser, Pope, Fielding, Macaulay, Marivaux—Alas, is there any need to pursue the catalogue to the bitter end? Need I mention Gibbon, or Froude, or Lingard, or Freeman, or the novelists? ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... very poor imitation of Moliere's "Festin de Pierre;" with the story of which the admirers of mute-shew have since been entertained, under the title of Don Juan. In the preface, Shadwell, after railing abundantly at Settle, is at the pains to assure us, there is no act ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... 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 Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... as in the comedy of Moliere, my uncle asked the precise question in the very words—not of my confidential valet, however, but across great distances of land, in a letter whose mocking but indulgent turn ill concealed his almost paternal ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... the same reason, that we have not enough of their works to qualify us for judges. While we are upon this subject, it will, perhaps, not displease the reader to see what that critick's opinion is of Lopes de Vega and Moliere. It will appear, that with respect to Lopes de Vega, he is rather too profuse of praise: that, in speaking of Moliere, he is ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... instances of this elsewhere. Perhaps Shakespear's tragedies would in some respects have been better if he had never written comedies at all; and in that case his comedies might well have been spared, though they must have cost us some regret. Racine, it is said, might have rivalled Moliere in comedy; but he gave up the cultivation of his comic talents to devote himself wholly to the tragic Muse. If, as the French tell us, he in consequence attained to the perfection of tragic composition, this was better than writing comedies as well as Moliere ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... men such as Dickens, have generally displayed a large sociability towards the society of letters, always expressed in the happy pursuit of pre-existent themes, sometimes expressed, as in the case of Moliere or Sterne, in downright plagiarism. For even theft is a confession of our dependence on society. In Dickens, however, this element of the original foundations on which he worked is quite especially difficult to determine. This is partly due to the fact that for the present reading public he ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... myself, as you can pick them up, second-handed or cheap, copies of Otway's Dramatic Works, Ben Jonson's, Dryden's, Congreve's, Wycherley's, Vanbrugh's, Cibber's, or any dramatic works of the more modern, Macklin, Garrick, Foote, Colman, or Sheridan. A good copy too of Moliere, in French, I much want. Any other good dramatic authors in that language I want also; but comic authors, chiefly, though I should wish to have Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire too. I am in no hurry for all, or any of these, but if you accidentally meet with ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... The design for the frontispiece of the edition of 1731, here reproduced, is from the pencil of Hogarth; and is the first trace of a connexion between Fielding and the painter who was to be honoured so frequently in his pages. An adaptation from Moliere, produced in 1733, under the title of the Miser, won from Voltaire the praise of having added to the original "quelques beautes de dialogue particulieres a sa [Fielding's] nation." The leading character in the Miser, ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... and encouraged by the greatest men, and admired by whole nations? And that Father Lebrun's impertinent libel against the stage is seen in a bookseller's shop, standing the very next to the immortal labors of Racine, of Corneille, of Moliere, etc.? ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... 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 fond parents dress'd in red and gold; Or where the pictures ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... against suspicion; it will not render the citadel at the mere sound of the trumpet; it arms all its forces, and bars its gates on the foe. Hence it is that the persons most easy to dupe in matters of affection are usually those most astute in the larger affairs of life. Moliere, reading every riddle in the vast complexities of human character, and clinging, in self-imposed credulity, to his profligate wife, is a type of a striking truth. Still, a foreboding, a warning instinct withheld Lucretia from plumbing farther into the deeps ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his damnation. It reconciled him sentimentally to God in a second version, and clamored for his canonization for a whole century, thus treating him as English journalism has treated that comic foe of the gods, Punch. Moliere's Don Juan casts back to the original in point of impenitence; but in piety he falls off greatly. True, he also proposes to repent; but in what terms? "Oui, ma foi! il faut s'amender. Encore vingt ou trente ans de cette vie-ci, et puis nous songerons a nous." After Moliere comes the artist-enchanter, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... Madame de Longueville belonged no more to this world. She died on the 15th April, 1679, at the Carmelites, where her remains were interred; her heart being taken to Port-Royal. A year afterwards, in the same convent of Carmelites, the Bishop of Autun, Roquette, whom Moliere had in view when drawing the character of Tartuffe, pronounced her funeral oration. Madame de Sevigne, who was present at the ceremony, says of the orator: "It was not a Tartuffe, it was not ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... 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 Mr. ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... fancy, when I say that we must learn poetry before we learn prose, that I am only advancing a paradox; mere talking is no more prose than mere rhyme is poetry. Monsieur Jourdain, in Moliere's comedy, makes, I suspect, a very great mistake, when he tells his master: "If that means prose, I've been talking prose all my life." I fancy the good man had been no more talking prose, than an awkward country boy has been really walking all his life, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... 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. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... men like Tennyson and Browning, who were profoundly capable of understanding what a great drama means, and is; who had read what the master-tragedians of Greece have done; who knew their Shakespeare, to say nothing of the other Elizabethan dramatists; who had seen Moliere on the stage; who must have felt how the thing ought to be done, composed, and versed; that they, having written a play like Harold or Strafford, should really wish to stage it, or having heard and seen it on the stage should go on writing more dramas, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Tragedy of Tragedies, a following of course of the Rehearsal, but full of humour and spirit. The most successful of his other dramatic works were the Mock Doctor and the Miser, adaptations of Moliere's famous pieces. His undoubted connection with the stage, and the fact of the contemporary existence of a certain Timothy Fielding, helped suggestions of less dignified occupations as actor, booth-keeper, and so forth; but these have long ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... predecessor of Peter.[12] His minister, Matveyef, the Slavic Mecaenas of his time, and himself a writer, invited the first stage-players to Russia; and at his instigation, the first secular drama, a translation of Moliere's "Medecin malgre lui," was played before the gratified princesses and their enraptured maids of honour. The sister of the two Tzars, the Tzarevna Sophia, was a great patroness of the dramatic art: and was herself the author of several tragedies and comedies, which were acted before her ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... a Count, is of course directly derived from Les Precieuses Ridicules, first performed 18 November, 1659, and Isabella is a close copy of Cathos and Magdelon. Flecknoe had already adapted Moliere in The Damoiselles a la Mode, unacted (4to 1667); and seven years later than Mrs. Behn, Shadwell, in his fine comedy, Bury Fair (1689), drew largely from the same source. His mock noble is a French peruke-maker, La Roch, who ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... the words 'to pandar' and 'pandarism'. 'Rodomontade' is from Rodomont, a blustering and boasting hero of Boiardo, adopted by Ariosto; 'thrasonical', from Thraso, the braggart of the Roman comedy. Cervantes has given us 'quixotic'; Swift 'lilliputian'; to Moliere the French language owes 'tartuffe' and 'tartufferie'. 'Reynard' too, which with us is a duplicate for fox, while in the French 'renard' has quite excluded the older 'volpils', was originally not the name of a kind, ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... of language and these classicisms were exaggerated by some of the 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 ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... source of pleasant memories. To live according to my fancy; to work as I wish and in my own way; to do nothing if I wish it; to dream of a beautiful future; to think of you and to know you are happy; to have as ladylove the Julie of Rousseau; to have La Fontaine and Moliere as friends, Racine for a master, and Pere-Lachaise to walk to,—oh! if it would only ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars |
