Joseph de Maistre

All grandeur, all power, and all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human…

— Joseph de Maistre

What a miserable world!--trouble if we love, and trouble if we do not love.

— Joseph de Maistre

Man in harmony with his Creator is sublime, and his action is creative; equally, once he separates himself from God and acts…

— Joseph de Maistre

What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution.

— Joseph de Maistre

“The word nature has given rise to a multitude of errors. Let me repeat that the nature of any being is the…

— Joseph de Maistre

“Nothing great has great beginnings.”

— Joseph de Maistre

We recognize in a plant some unknown power, a single, form-giving force, which creates and conserves, which moves unwaveringly toward its end,…

— Joseph de Maistre

Reason speaks in words alone, but love has a song.

— Joseph de Maistre

The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without…

— Joseph de Maistre

The great fault in women is to desire to be like men.

— Joseph de Maistre

No man has ceased to believe in God before having decided that he should not exist; no book would produce atheism, and…

— Joseph de Maistre

To know how to wait is the great secret of success.

— Joseph de Maistre

It is one of man's curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties for the pleasure of resolving them.

— Joseph de Maistre

Man may well have covered over and, so to speak, encrusted the truth with the errors he has loaded onto it, but…

— Joseph de Maistre

Man, in spite of his fatal degradation, bears always the evident marks of his divine origin, in that every universal belief is…

— Joseph de Maistre

Government is a true religion: it has its dogmas, its mysteries, its priests. To submit it to the individual discussion is to…

— Joseph de Maistre

I don't know what a scoundrel is like, but I know what a respectable man is like, and it's enough to make…

— Joseph de Maistre

Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself,…

— Joseph de Maistre

We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a…

— Joseph de Maistre

“To hear these defenders of democracy talk, one would think that the people deliberate like a committee of wise men, whereas in…

— Joseph de Maistre

False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the…

— Joseph de Maistre

It can even come about that a created will cancels out, not perhaps the exertion, but the result of divine action; for…

— Joseph de Maistre

A constitution that is made for all nations is made for none.

— Joseph de Maistre

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an…

— Joseph de Maistre

In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the…

— Joseph de Maistre