United States or Syria ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
C. A. Young, Manual of Astronomy, p. 571, and Prof. Condorcet's biography of his master is one of the noblest works of its class in French literature. Turgot's was one of those minds that like Chamfort's or Villiers de L'Isle Adam's scatter bounteously the ideas which others use or misuse.
Chamfort's utterance in this respect is remarkable: Quand un homme et une femme ont l'un pour l'autre une passion violente, il me semble toujours que quelque soient les obstacles qui les s�parent, un mari, des parens, etc.; les deux amans sont l'un � l'autre, de par la Nature, qu'ils s'appartiennent de droit devin, malgr� les lois et les conventions humaines.... From this standpoint the greater part of the Decameron seems a mere mocking and jeering on the part of the genius of the species at the rights and interests of the individual which it treads underfoot.
All this criticism of the principle of which the Fortnightly Review was the earliest English adherent, will not be taken as the result in the present writer of Chamfort's maladie des désabusés; that would be both extremely ungrateful and without excuse or reason.
Schopenhauer gave to one of his minor works the name of Aphorismen zu Lebens-Weisheit, "Aphorisms for the Wisdom of Life," and he put to it, by way of motto, Chamfort's saying, "Happiness is no easy matter; 'tis very hard to find it within ourselves, and impossible to find it anywhere else."
Tolstoi, informed by something of the rage of the old ascetics, is too iconoclast; Maupassant's stories sometimes suggest a cynicism as profound as Chamfort's or that old French poet's who wrote: Femme, plaisir de demye heure, Et ennuy qui sans fin demeure. Ibsen is as idealistic as Strindberg is materialist.
Word Of The Day