“What should be done to help you? Let us be!”

— Jean-Baptiste Colbert

Que faut-il faire pour vous aider?
Laissez-nous faire!
Alleged conversation between French Finance Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert and a merchant named Legendre (1680), quoted in, among others, "The End of Laissez-Faire" (1926) by John Maynard Keynes

Original

Que faut-il faire pour vous aider? Laissez-nous faire!

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Jean-Baptiste Colbert 3

French politician 1619–1683

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

¿Y para qué debo arrepentirme de lo que he hecho, si no puedo dejar de hacer lo que hago, que es lo que he hecho?
Voces (1943)

“Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”

Eugene O'Neill Long Day's Journey into Night

Page 63 (Act 2, Scene 1)
Long Day's Journey into Night (1955)
Source: Long Day's Journey Into Night
Context: But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can't help it. None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.

“I don't forgive him," I said.
"Hell, no, you don't. And why should you? So he can feel better? Get on with his life? And what's he done to help you get on with yours?”

Kelley Armstrong book Frostbitten

Source: Frostbitten

“What is this gallery? Why should she have a gallery of things done by us?”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 3, p. 30

“Fear is an instinct, like hunger or anger. We need it to help us survive, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. It lets us know whether we should fight or flee.”

David Clement-Davies book The Sight

Source: The Sight

“Well, I know what I have to do, so it is simple. Duty is a wonderful thing. I do not know what I should have done without duty since young Tom died. You could have painted, he told himself. Or you could have done something useful. Maybe, he thought. Duty is simpler.
This is useful, he thought. Do not think against it. It helps to get it over with. That's all we are working for. Christ knows what there is beyond that.”

Ernest Hemingway book Islands in the Stream

Pt. 3: At Sea, Section 15
Islands in the Stream (1970)

“Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.”

Lorrie Moore (1957) American writer

Source: Self-Help

“There's got to be in every ward somebody that any bloke can come to—no matter what he's done—and get help. Help, you understand; none of your law and your justice, but help.”

Martin Lomasney (1859–1933) American politician

Van Nostrand, Albert D. (December 1948). "The Lomasney Legend". The New England Quarterly. 21 (4): 457. JSTOR 361565 https://www.jstor.org/stable/361565

“Let us distinguish between acting intentionally and acting deliberately or on purpose, as far as this can be done by attending to what language can teach us.”

J. L. Austin (1911–1960) English philosopher

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 273.

“What should be done to help you? Let us be!”

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Jean-Baptiste Colbert 3

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