“[Prudence] replaces [strength] by saving the man who has the misfortune of not possessing it from most occasions when it's needed.”
Reflections
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Nicolas Chamfort 54
French writer 1741–1794Related quotes
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), I : The Man of Flesh and Bone
Context: It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their normality in their misfortune — that is to say, when they endeavor to persist in their own being — prefer misfortune to non-existence. For myself I can say that when a as a youth, and even as a child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as one of our ascetics [San Juan de los Angeles] has put it.
Source: All The Pretty Horses: All The Pretty Horses
Chronicle "Interdit aux hommes" (Forbidden to men), by Doris Veillette-Hamel, Journal Le Nouvelliste, June 10, 1972, page 19.
Chronicle "Forbidden to men", 1972
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 578.
"Pope Speaks in Rome Synagogue, in the First Such Visit on Record" http://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/14/international/europe/14POPE.html by E. J. Dionne Jr, The New York Times, 13 April 1986, retrieved 9 August 2010.
