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More "Moliere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 the scullion lads.' At the same time, Charles Edward's ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... floor, builds three, thus ruining the beautiful double staircase which extended without interruption from the top to the bottom. Then one day, on the second floor, facing the front, under the magnificent ceiling covered with salamanders and painted ornaments which are now crumbling away, Moliere produced for the first time Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. Then it was given to the Marechal de Saxe; then to the Polignacs, and finally to a plain soldier, Berthier. It was afterwards bought back by subscription and presented to the Duc de Bordeaux. ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... convents to the court; where they were performed before Tzar Fedor, the 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, ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... Kant. "By means of a means (faculty)"—he had said, or at least meant to say. But, is that—an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? "By means of a means (faculty)," namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliere, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... innate power possessed by organisms is no explanation, but is a reproduction of the absurdity, l'opium endormit parcequ'il a une vertu soporifique. It is contended, however, that this objection does not apply, even if it be conceded that there is that force in Moliere's ridicule which is generally attributed to it.[231] Much, however, might be said in opposition to more than one of that brilliant dramatist's smart philosophical epigrams, just as to the theological ones ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... almost without incident; and the dialogue of their comedies consists of moral, insipid apophthegms, intirely destitute of wit or repartee. I know what I hazard by this opinion among the implicit admirers of Lully, Racine, and Moliere. ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... 12. R. Strauss's orchestral suite from "Der Buerger als Edelman" (opera based on Moliere's play "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme") given by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with Alfred de Voto ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... 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, is a small telescope, have the goodness to apply your eye to this glass, and look at that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... Moliere's play, in which the hero, Don Juan, rashly invites the statue of a man he has murdered to dine with him. The ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... the patient not to be hypochondriacally melancholic; or, even if he were not, he must surely become so because of the elegance of the things you have said and the accuracy of your reasoning." We might multiply examples, for all we need do would be to call up Moliere's doctors, one after the other. However far, moreover, comic fancy may seem to go, reality at times undertakes to improve upon it. It was suggested to a contemporary philosopher, an out-and-out arguer, that his arguments, though irreproachable in ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... falsehood. Nothing annoyed her more in society than to have to listen to the compositions women make as a substitute for the original truth. It was as if, when she went to the theater to hear Shakspere and Moliere, the actors should try to impose upon the audience by reciting lines of their own. Truth was the wit of life and the wit of books. She traveled her road from affluence so leisurely that nothing escaped her eyes ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... proves many things. Life is large, unlimited, and incessant; and the lessons of the finest art are those of life itself; they are not single but multiple. Who can declare what is the single moral contained in the "OEdipus" of Sophocles, the "Hamlet" of Shakespeare, the "Tartufe" of Moliere? No two spectators of these masterpieces would agree on the special morals to be isolated; and yet none of them would deny that the masterpieces are profoundly moral because of their essential truth. ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... probably, Moliere's "Mamamouchi"; and the modern French use "Mamalue." See Savary's Letters, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Modern Stage (Vol. iii., p. 105.)—Moliere has availed himself in the comedy of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme very liberally of the comedy of the Clouds. The lesson in grammar given to Monsr. Jourdain is nearly the same as that which Socrates ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... ask 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 ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... me, it was an illiberal sarcasm at the church, which had begun in the theatre about the time the Tartuffe was given in it by Moliere: but like other remains of Gothic manners, was declining.—Every nation, continued he, have their refinements and grossiertes, in which they take the lead, and lose it of one another by turns: —that he had been in most countries, but never in one where he found not some delicacies, ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... plunge. See—to-night I have put on pearls, and diamonds, and rings, that the Baronessa would never let me wear. And I 've got a whole bagful of books, to read in the train—Anatole France, and Shakespeare, and Gyp, and Pierre Loti, and Moliere, and Max Beerbohm, and everybody: all the books the Baronessa would have died a thousand deaths rather than let me look at. That's the nuisance of being a woman of position—you 're brought up never to read anything ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... he wrote a page "une feuille lue aujourd'hui, oubliee demain." Therefore, he gave his copies to the compositors without rereading them. Concerning the correctness of his writings, his biographer writes: "Like Carlyle, Shelly, Bossuet, Mirabeau and Moliere, the editor of La Sentinelle perpetrated many a small sin against the rules of grammar and certainly paid but a halting attention to the nice distinctions of punctuation. He very often did not know where to end a paragraph and begin another. On the whole, he is happily not obscure." ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... public, annoyed its susceptibilities, held it in supreme contempt, raved at it from the stage and platform, and the public, amazed at his cleverness, received him as the rude philosopher who looked a genius, talked like a whirlwind, said that he was greater than Shakespeare, said he was the Moliere of the twentieth century, and posed until it ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... the morning, all these symptoms, or any part of them, show that you have before you a candidate of the disease known as bloating of the stomach or the gout. According to the wise enumeration of Moliere, who was evidently prompted by Renaudot, such a person begins with bradypepsia (slow digestion), then suffers from dyspepsia (bad digestion), afterward from apepsia (indigestion), and later lyentery (a lax or diarrhea in which food ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... Mask 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 generally ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... little of her home butter and cheese to keep her from actual starvation. The council at Geneva provided for her necessities by requiring the restoration of the amount of her dot, and to her and her daughter possession of the chateaux of Aubonne and Moliere for their lives, with a purchasable reversion in favor of Count Jean. But when, dying early, Helene, in defiance of this provision, left these properties to her husband and his family, there were more quarrels about their possession, and again the European ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... born blind, ravished by the wonders of the world, breaks forth in praise to God. The higher Morality naturally selected types of character for satire or commendation. It is easy to perceive how such a comic art as that of Moliere lay in germ in this species of the mediaeval drama. At a late period examples are found of the historical Morality. The pathetic l'Empereur qui tua son Neveu exhibits in its action and its stormy emotion something of tragic power. The advent of the pseudo-classical ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... race-track tout or city bar-tender (for color, this last), to marvel that one of L——'s sense, or any one indeed, should live in the country at all. There were drinking bouts, absolute drunkenness, in which, according to the Johnsonian tradition and that of Messieurs Rabelais and Moliere, the weary intellect and one's guiding genius were immersed in a comforting ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... 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 in the piece which cost him above four days writing, and the ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... bladder in order to extract a stone, and of closing the wound again; the first man who knew how to stop gangrene in a part of the body, were without a doubt almost divine persons, and did not resemble Moliere's doctors. ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... domains a servile imitation of the stiff parks of Versailles,—the days of powdered wigs and long cues,—when French ballet-dancers gave the tone, and French actors strutted on every stage,—when Boileau was the great canon of criticism, and Racine and Moliere perpetuated in tragedy and comedy a pseudo-classicism. They are far, those times when Frederick the Great wrote French at which Voltaire laughed, and could find no better occupation for his leisure hours at Sans-Souci ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... Camden has made a certain amend in putting Walt into the gay mosaic that adorns the portico of the new public library in Cooper Park. There, absurdly represented in an austere black cassock, he stands in the following frieze of great figures: Dante, Whitman, Moliere, Gutenberg, Tyndale, Washington, Penn, Columbus, Moses, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Longfellow and Palestrina. I believe that there was some rumpus as to whether Walt should be included; but, anyway, ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... has been called the Moliere of Italy, wrote La Bottega di Caffe, (The Coffee House), a naturalistic comedy of bourgeois Venice, satirizing scandal and gambling, in 1750. The scene is a Venetian coffee house (probably Florian's), where ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... countrymen) to make it manifest that epic poems may be made "without a genius," nay, without learning, or much reading. This must necessarily be of great use to all those poets who confess they never read, and of whom the world is convinced they never learn. What Moliere observes of making a dinner, that any man can do it with money, and if a profest cook can not without, he has his art for nothing, the same may be said of making a poem—it is easily brought about by him that has a genius, but the skill lies ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... not one of them can compare with Voiture or Godeau, with Bussy or St. Evremond, still less with Scarron or Moliere," said De Malfort. "I have heard more wit in one evening at Scarron's than in a week at Whitehall. Wit in France has its basis in thought and erudition. Here it is the sparkle and froth of empty minds, a trick of speech, a ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... understanding. Another came from the bedchamber of Philip II of Spain—a grand high clock that had tolled the hours in that great hall beyond my door. A little thing, in a case of carved ivory, that ticked on a table near my bed, Moliere had given to one of her ancestors, and there were many ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... great humorists have been men grave at heart, and often men of more than ordinary trials. None but the superficial can fail to recognize the severity of Rabelais's genius. The best portion of poor Moliere's manhood was steeped in sorrow. The life of Swift was a hidden tragedy. The immortal wit of "Hudibras" did not save Butler from the straits and struggles of narrow means. Cervantes spent much of his time in a prison, and much of his grandest humor had there its birthplace. Farquhar died young, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... did the art of dancing attain such eminent honours in the eyes of mankind, as during the siecle dore of the latter monarch. At an epoch boasting of Moliere and Racine, Bossuet and Fenelon, Boileau and La Fontaine, Colbert and Perrault, (the fairy talisman of politics and architecture,) the court of Versailles could imagine no manifestation of regality more august, or more exquisite, than that of getting up a royal ballet; and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... 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: ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... willing to place his general and original merits. Landseer's dogs were the most magnificent things I ever saw—leaping, and bounding, and grinning on the canvas. Leslie has great powers; and the scenes from Moliere by [Newton] are excellent. Yet painting wants a regenerator—some one who will sweep the cobwebs out of his head before he takes the palette, as Chantrey has done in the sister art. At present we are painting pictures from the ancients, as authors in the days of Louis Quatorze wrote epic ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... of this play was given by Louis XIV. It was acted before him at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, on February 4, 1670, but was never represented in Paris, and was only printed after Moliere's death. It is one of the weakest plays of Moliere, upon whom unfortunately now rested the whole responsibility of the court entertainments. His attack upon astrology is the most ...
— The Magnificent Lovers (Les Amants magnifiques) • Moliere
... and sooterkins of wit. Next, o'er his books his 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... 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 ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... French housewife, the French mother, and the French patriot, have always been splendid examples to those who are apt to think on the world's progress. The birthplace of the forerunners of the modern social and civic spirit and the mother of the most genuine philhellenism, the France of Rabelais, Moliere and Voltaire and Beranger and Hugo has always been an object of respectful sympathy for those in Greece who are admirers of the beautiful, the liberal, and ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... Candide, wonderful as it is, has many a stroke of malice, and Tristram Shandy, wonderful as that is too, is not without tinges of self-consciousness; and neither malice nor self-consciousness belongs to the greater gods of buffoonery. Cervantes and Moliere, those great geniuses of finest temper, still have none of the reckless buffoonery of such scenes as that between Prince Henry and the drawer, or the mad extravagances of the Merry Wives; still less of the wild topsy-turvy of the Birds or the Peace. They have not ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... sufferer would rest under a perpetual nightmare until charitable 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? To my mind the terrific task shadowed ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... by anyone. He then explained his conduct to the senate, saying that he was the victim of a malady which, at times, rendered him incapable of standing. During the attacks of this disorder "he felt shocks in his limbs, became giddy, and at last lost consciousness." Moliere was the victim of epilepsy; so also was Petrarch, Flaubert, Charles V., Handel, St. Paul, Peter the Great, and Dostoieffsky; Paganini, Mozart, Schiller, Alfieri, Pascal, Richelieu, Newton, and Swift were the victims of diseases epileptoid ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... and eighteenth-century authors. At an after-period only, when he had definitely entered upon his maturer literary career, was he to take up the latter and use them, together with Rabelais, La Bruyere, Moliere, and Diderot, as his best, if not his constant, sources of inspiration. In the stories of the first of the three above-mentioned modern writers, the reader usually meets with some child of poor parentage, who, after most extraordinary ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... re-read the oftenest are not always those that we admire the most; we choose and we revisit them for many and various reasons, as we choose and revisit human friends. One or two of Scott's novels, Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne, "The Egoist," and the "Vicomte de Bragelonne," form the inner circle of my intimates. Behind these comes a good troop of dear acquaintances; "The Pilgrim's Progress" in the front rank, "The Bible in Spain" not far behind. There are besides a certain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... genres hors le genre ennuyux,[43] and 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
... Deadly, the Christian Church could never have clothed them in garments of tragic dignity. Unless you cut deep into life, wantonness and gaiety lose their savour and are not fit for the ends of art. The French spirit is not only embodied in Rabelais and Montaigne and Moliere—if these are your superficial men!—but also in Pascal. Was there so great a gulf between Pascal and Daumier? And I find not only the spirit of Pascal in some of these pictures in Le Rire, but sometimes even his very phrases used as the ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... Addison's Remarks on Italy. Addison not much conversant with Italian literature. The French masters of the art of accommodating literature. Their Ana. Racine. Corneille. Moliere. Fenelon. Voltaire. Bossuet. Massillon. Bourdaloue. Virgil's description of the entrance into hell, compared to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... 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
... the painter, was apprenticed to a pastry-cook; Moliere, the author, to an upholsterer; and Guido, the famous painter of Aurora, was sent to a ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... brilliant circle Lully moved in. He had the honour of being hated by Boileau and La Fontaine, and of being first the friend and collaborator, and later the enemy, of Moliere. His contract of marriage was signed by the king, queen, and the queen-mother. Of his marriage, Fetis says: "Never was a union better arranged, for if Lully was quick to procure riches, his wife knew how to fructify them by the order and the economy that reigned in ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... volume of Sermons, all written with a distinguished air of piety, and a becoming zeal for the interest of true religion; and was principally concerned in the translation of Moliere's ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... 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 was ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... enunciating in monosyllables the wisdom of the ages, the poetry of the future. This play was, for her, and for Paris, too, the last word in dramatic art, the supreme nuance of beauty. Everything had been accomplished: Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen; yet here was a new evocation, a fresh peep at untrodden paths. In bliss that almost dissolved her being, the emotional American girl reached her hotel, where she tried to sleep. When her aunt ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... most distorted forms. It was not without some reason that, in those days, they loved to chisel or carve on every house door and on the neck of every violin a hideous face which is making grimaces and sticking out its tongue. Many of the figures in Moliere's and Holberg's comedies, and in the innumerable farces written in imitation of them in the eighteenth century, now appear to us clumsy, extravagant caricatures. But if we recall such historical phenomena ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... S. Alfio a medical man? Why do you call it a miracle when a medical man cures his patient? Have you been reading the plays of Moliere?" ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... 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 to repaint ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... finished portrait of a doctor. Moliere caricatured him. Thackeray failed to draw him, and generally in novels he is merely a man who is labelled "Doctor." The sole exception known to me is the marvellous delineation of Lydgate in "Middlemarch." He is all over the physician, ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... word truly interesting, truly poetical. It associates itself with the entertainments of the ancients, with the Augustan age, with Horace and Maecenas; with the only elegant but too fleeting period of the modern world; with the nobles and wits of Paris, when Paris had wits and nobles; with Moliere and the warm-hearted Duke who is said to have been the original of Moliere's Misanthrope; with Madame de Sevigne and the Racine whom that inimitable letter-writer denied to be a poet; with Swift and Bolingbroke; with ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... occasionally are, he says many sharp, many brilliant, many epigrammatic things, he has the manner of the famous essayists, he is paradoxical (how many of his paradoxes are now truisms!); one fancies at times that one is almost listening to a creation of Moliere, but these fireworks are not merely a literary display, they are used to illumine what he considers to be the truth. Rien n'est beau que le vrai; le vrai seul est aimable, he quotes; he was a deliberate and diligent searcher after truth, always striving to attain ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... our once desponding, over-anxious, over-burdened latter-day souls have swelled with joy and pride and hope at the triumphs of our own day all along the line! Yea, even though we have heard the illustrious Bossuet preach, and applauded Moliere in one of his own plays, and gazed at and listened to (and almost forgiven) Racine and Corneille, and Boileau and Fenelon, and the good Lafontaine—those five ruthless persecutors of our own innocent ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... 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 for a bottle ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... received by the judiciary with a frown, by the other spectators with a murmur of applause, and by the beautiful daughter of the house of Mancini with one of those bewitching smiles which have been celebrated in the sonnets of Benserade, Corneille, Moliere, ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... Rollin's Ancient History since you left me. I am determined to go through with it, if possible, in these days of solitude."[63] And again in a letter written on December 5, 1773, to Mercy Warren, she says: "I send with this the first volume of Moliere and should be glad of your opinion of the plays. I cannot be brought to like them. There seems to me to be a general want of spirit. At the close of every one, I have felt disappointed. There are no characters but what appear ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... Samarkand, we come to the academy over which Alcuin presided, a branch of the School of the Palace established by Charlemagne in 782. This academy was the prototype of the learned coteries of Paris which Moliere afterwards satirized. It took all knowledge for its province; it included the learned priest and the prince who could not write his own name, and it sought to solve all ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... D'Alembert, "Let us not attribute to the stage the power of changing opinions or manners, when it has only that of following and heightening them. An author who offends the general taste may as well cease to write, for nobody will read his works. When Moliere reformed the stage he attacked modes and ridiculous customs, but he did not insult the public taste; he either followed or explained it." So far Rousseau was right. It is the public that gives the stage its bias—necessarily preceding it in taste and opinion, and pointing out the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... work on idolatry, theism and natural religion, a historic monograph on the Vaudois, some outlined letters on Paris, literature, and the general police system of the realm of letters. In his youthful enthusiasms, Honore de Balzac shifted from Beaumarchais to Moliere, from Voltaire to Rousseau, from Racine to Corneille, and, contrary to his temperament, he drew up plans for violent and pathetic dramas, suited to the taste of ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... rather than with the right. Before Ibsen, prose had been but a 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 ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... 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 person, almost fainted. Jeanne quickly followed the books to the foot of the ladder. ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... 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, how the Greeks had an innate taste for mysteries. That ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... confusion arising out of a life wholly give up to sensual indulgence? that fearful picture of a deliberate effort to shut out the thought of debts and duels, deceit and evil luck? In that music Mozart disputes the palm with Moliere. The terrific finale, with its glow, its power, its despair and laughter, its grisly spectres and elfish women, centres about the prodigal's last effort made in the after-supper heat of wine, the frantic struggle which ends the drama. Victurnien was living through this infernal poem, and alone. ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... "Eugenie Grandet," he was tremendous. It made me more than ever wishful to see him in the griping, ruthless Overreach, foiled at last in his wicked ambition and driven to frenzy by the destruction of the document by which he thought to satisfy his lust of gain. Moliere's Avare I thought he would have acted wonderfully; Ben Jonson's Volpone, in "The Fox," he would surely have understood, and powerfully rendered. In the devoted father of "The Porter's Knot" he was likewise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... theatre, is the MOLIERE of his company; that is, he is at once author and actor, and, in both lines, indefatigable. Undoubtedly, the most striking, and, some say, the only resemblance he bears to the mirror of French comedy, is to be compelled to bring ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... simply pushed out. George Sand had a remarkable gift for bringing out the characteristics of the persons with whom she had any intercourse. This Pagello, thanks to his adventure with her, has become in the eyes of the world a personage as comic as one of Moliere's characters. ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... some token of the 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 displaying dogmatically the inevitable brandings of racial and national traits ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... your physician." There is nothing dishonourable in such a disorder, which is more peculiarly the malady of students. It has been the complaint of the good, and the wise, and the witty, and even of the gay. Regnard, the author of the last French comedy after Moliere, was atrabilious; and Moliere himself, saturnine. Dr. Johnson, Gray, and Burns, were all more or less affected by it occasionally. It was the prelude to the more awful malady of Collins, Cowper, Swift, and Smart; but it by no means follows ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... appreciate even grandeur and originality, if they were too strongly and boldly marked. 'It is easy to criticise an author,' he has said, 'but hard to estimate him.'[23] This was never more unfortunately proved than in the remarks of Vauvenargues himself upon the great Moliere. There is almost a difficulty in forgiving a writer who can say that 'La Bruyere, animated with nearly the same genius, painted the crookedness of men with as much truth and as much force as Moliere; but I believe that there ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... ancients, I venture to oppose singly the matchless Moliere, as the most consummate master of comedy that former or latter ages have produced. He was not content with painting obvious and common characters, but set himself closely to examine the numberless varieties of human nature: ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... Like the 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 words here are an unconscious reminiscence of Colley ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to a very great extent found their way into conversational language. Nevertheless this scholastic and artificial classicism of the Ciceronian period stood to the Scipionic as repentance to innocence, or the French of the classicists under Napoleon to the model French of Moliere and Boileau; while the former classicism had sprung out of the full freshness of life, the latter as it were caught just in right time the last breath of a race perishing beyond recovery. Such as it was, it rapidly diffused itself. With ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Danish Moliere. It is true that he learned many lessons of technique from the great trench dramatist, and borrowed freely and often from his work; but he differs from Moliere both in the quality of his humor and in ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... did not seem to be greatly astonished, and the sole sound which broke the stillness was his sardonic chuckle. Perhaps the little man had progressed beyond the point of being surprised at anything, or, like, Moliere's hero, was only surprised at finding virtue ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... monopolised by some fad or 'cause,' which is a poor substitute for love of country. The man who has no prejudices in favour of his own family and his own country is generally an unamiable creature. So we need not condemn Moliere for saying, 'L'ami du genre humain n'est pas du tout mon fait,' nor Brunetiere for declaring that 'Ni la nature ni l'histoire n'ont en effet voulu que les hommes fussent tous freres.' But French Neo-catholicism, a bourgeois movement directed ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Juan became such a pet that the world could not bear 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 ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... 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; and ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... likewise for 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
... tempt you irresistibly towards the end of the road that curves out at the north-west corner of the church, just opposite the famous fountain which has been so mutilated by the Huguenots. At this point turn sharply to the left, down the Rue Martainville eastwards. To the south the Rue Moliere flings its quaint legendary shadows towards the river. A little further on, a dark square opening makes a patch of black beneath the gabled windows of No. 190. That is the entrance to the Aitre St. Maclou, the oldest cemetery in Rouen, and ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... Observe the least pretension on account of the rank or fortune On domestic management depends the preservation of their fortune Spirit of party can degrade the character of a nation Tastes may change The anti-Austrian party, discontented and vindictive They say you live very poorly here, Moliere True nobility, gentlemen, consists in giving proofs of it We must have obedience, and no reasoning What do young women stand in need of?—Mothers! "Would be a pity," she said, "to stop when so fairly on the road" Your swords have rusted ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Court Memoirs of France • David Widger
... told that France stands pre-eminent in dramatic excellence; that Corneille, Racine, and Moliere, were contemporaries of Bossuet, Massillon, and Boileau; that the tragedies of Voltaire were the highest effort of his vast and varied genius? Germany, albeit the last-born in the literary family of Europe, has already vindicated its title to a foremost place in this noble ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... to flight all the ancient examples brought 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, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... says Dr. Maurice Raynaud—from whose charming book on the 'Doctors of the Time of Moliere' I quote—"is not, as one might think, the translation of a piece of poetry. It is simply part of a public oration by Francois Fanchon, one of the most illustrious chancellors of the faculty of medicine of Montpellier in the seventeenth century." "From time immemorial," he says, "'the faculty' ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... like Moliere Doctors, will tell you: "Enthusiasms, Self-sacrifice, Heaven, Hell and suchlike: yes, all that was true enough for old stupid times; all that used to be true: but we have changed all that, nous avons change tout cela!" Well; if the heart be got round now ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... he found a hundred men assembled to insult one of his friends, and he attacked them, killed two, mortally wounded seven, and dispersed all the rest. He died at Paris in 1655, struck by a huge beam falling into the street. As an author he was strangely underrated by his fellow-countrymen. Moliere was the only man who really appreciated him. For some centuries his works have been more esteemed in England than in France. Many English writers, from Dean Swift to Samuel Butler, the author of "Erewhon," have been inspired by his "Voyage to the Moon," the English equivalent of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... first year were French, German, history, English composition and English literature. In the French course I read some of the works of Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Alfred de Musset and Sainte-Beuve, and in the German those of Goethe and Schiller. I reviewed rapidly the whole period of history from the fall of the Roman Empire to the eighteenth century, and ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... peculiar to the manner of Terence. An ordinary writer would have indulged himself in twenty little conceits on this occasion; but the dry gravity of Terence infinitely surpasses, as true humor, all the drolleries which, perhaps, even those great masters of Comedy, Plautus or Moliere, might have been tempted to throw out. It is the highest art of a Dramatic Author, on some occasions, to leave a good deal to the Actor; and it has been remarked by Heinsius and others, that Terence was particularly ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... the great hall of this building the members of the Academy hold their sittings; the vestibules are adorned by marble statues of men whose intellectual powers have rendered their names renowned throughout the world, as Montesquieu, Moliere, Corneille, Racine, Sully, etc., etc. The Mazarine library is attached to this institution and contains 120,000 printed volumes besides 4,500 manuscripts. There is also under the same establishment the library of the Institute, which includes 115,000 volumes; ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... This is not so difficult as the public might imagine. Few works conduce to much vanity; much labor conduces to great diffidence. This observation accounts for the study of their own works made by Corneille, Moliere, and other great writers; if it is impossible to equal them in their fine conceptions, we may try to ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... a whirlpool is society! Didn't I tell you once that in Paris one must be as the Parisians? Society there drives out all sentiment; it lays en embargo on your time; and unless you are very careful, soon eats away your heart altogether. What an amazing masterpiece is the character of Celimene in Moliere's Le Misanthrope! She is the society woman, not only of Louis XIV.'s time, but of our own, and ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... country's nationality—one of that small but illustrious bard, whose writings have become part of the very household language of their native land—whose lightest words may be incessantly heard from the lips of all classes; and whose expressions may be said, like those of Shakspeare, of Moliere, and of Cervantes, to have become the natural forms embodying the ideas which they have expressed, and in expressing, consecrated. In a word, Pushkin is undeniably and essentially the great national ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... generally. It is derived from "Gens Francorum," and dates from Crusading days when the French played the leading part. Hence the Lingua Franca, the Levantine jargon, of which Moliere has left such a ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... of the one in which they have flourished, they are forgotten and neglected by every one in an incredibly short time. This somehow happens among us quite suddenly, like the shifting of the scenes on the stage. Oh, it's not at all the same as with Pushkin, Gogol, Moliere, Voltaire, all those great men who really had a new original word to say! It's true, too, that these talented gentlemen of the middling sort in the decline of their venerable years usually write themselves out in the most pitiful way, though they don't observe the fact ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... we took the French writers of Louis XIV. and we all feel that Moliere and La Fontaine and Mme. de Sevigne are our personal friends, so that the value of their books is doubled ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... compliment kindly to knit two pairs of mits for me, as a remembrance and slight acknowledgment. M. Weber wrote out whatever I required gratis, gave me the music-paper, and also made me a present of Moliere's Comedies (as he knew that I had never read them), with this inscription:—"Ricevi, amico, le opere di Moliere, in segno di gratitudine, e qualche volta ricordati di me." [Footnote: "Accept, my dear friend, Moliere's works as a token of my gratitude; and sometimes ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... and expression—a fact evidenced in the case of Aristophanes, Plautus, and all the poets who have followed in their track. Even Shakspeare, with all his sublimity, suffers us to fall very low now and then. Again, Lope De Vega, Moliere, Regnard, Goldoni worry us with frequent trifling. Holberg drags us down into the mire. Schlegel, a German poet, among the most remarkable for intellectual talent, with genius to raise him to a place among poets of the first order; Gellert, a truly simple poet, Rabener, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... forgotten, although once mentioned in the same breath with Moliere, wrote the pioneer clavier instruction book. In it he directs scholars how to avoid a harsh tone, and how to form a legato style. He advises parents to select teachers on whom implicit reliance may ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... predestined, three hundred volumes and ten masterpieces, recognized as such by the genuflections of an adoring universe, will not aid him to open its doors.' Evidently Balzac was not predestined but then neither was Moliere, and there must have been some ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... or to all appearance so unworthy of a rational being, that the magic of vanity cannot throw a halo of dignity over it, and persuade the agent that it is mainly by his exertions that society is kept together, as Moliere's dancing-master reasoned that the secret of good government is the secret of good dancing—namely, how to avoid false steps. And it is this genial promoter of human happiness, this all-powerful diffuser of social harmony, this lubricating oil without which ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... visible action goes,—comedy bustling, crammed with incident, and quite regardless of decorum,—might seem a law of nature to the audience of AEschylus and Aristophanes, of Plautus and Pacuvius, even to the audience of Moliere and Racine. But the vast and final change, the inception of which we have here to record, has made tragedy, tragi-comedy, comedy, and farce pass into one another so gradually, and with so little of a break in the English mind, that Gammer Gurton's Needle and Gorboduc, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... discovering in it a reflective side; and for half an hour I remained in a leafy alcove listening to her refined converse,—dealing with books like "Corinne," and "La Chaumiere Indienne,"—La Fontaine, Moliere, Montesquieu,—and especially interesting me in the society which moved around us, which as she touched it with her wand of history and eloquence, acquired an inconceivable interest for me, and I was for the first time proud ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... pray you, Sir," he said. "We are not at the Theatre Moliere, but, I presume, in an office where business is transacted both ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... which has kept (or indeed which ever received) competent applause is Tom Thumb, or the 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
... he forgotten Aristophanes? Has he forgotten Plautus! No—but their pleasantry is not excellent to his taste; and he tacitly agrees with Horace in censuring the "coarse railleries and cold jests" of the Great Original of Moliere! ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... MOLIERE, that celebrated Dramatick Writer, was, by him, intended to reprove a vain, fantastical, conceited and preposterous Humour, which about that time prevailed very much in France. It had the desir'd good ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... given as much to assist the medical man as his patient." Lectures (London, 1832), p. 14.] Opium is believed in, and quinine, and "rum," using that expressive monosyllable to mean all alcoholic cordials. If Moliere were writing now, instead of saignare, purgare, and the other, he would be more like to say, Stimulare, opium dare ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... critics are struck by the tragic relations subsisting between the virtuous discreet Northern wife and the peccable, expansive Southern husband, while others see in the latter the hero of a comedy of manners almost worthy of Moliere. If Numa represents the highest achievement of Daudet in dramatic fiction or else in the art of characterization, The Evangelist proved that his genius was not at home in those fields. Instead of marking an ordered advance, this overwrought study of Protestant bigotry ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... affect or delight us, such men are often susceptible of feelings the most ardent on their own account, although they may not directly express as much. It is difficult to believe that Shakspeare and Moliere, the noblest types of this class of exalted minds, did not contemplate life with feelings of deep and, perhaps, melancholy emotion. It was not so, however, with Scott, who certainly belonged not to their kindred, possessing neither the vigour of combination, nor the style which distinguished ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... select entertainments arranged at this time. The troupe of aristocratic comedians was greeted with enthusiastic applause, and the popular author received an ovation from his audience of monarchs and princes such as fate never bestowed upon Beaumarchais, Marivaux, or even Moliere! ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... shown in reading off any of the scenes in a popular English play; often accompanying his quotations with shrewd and ingenious critical comments. He was also very fond of the French Dramatists, particularly Moliere, from whom I have heard him quote entire scenes with wonderful accuracy. You might have imagined him reading from the book, as I have several times myself observed, and heard others remark: and all this he did ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... works, the number of French books given place in his shelves was strictly limited. He was completely indifferent to those works which it is fashionable to praise. "The broad laugh of Rabelais," and "the deep comedy of Moliere," did not succeed in diverting him, and the antipathy he felt against these farces was so great that he did not hesitate to liken them, in the point of art, to the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... the Theatre Francais, with Talma at their head, were appointed to amuse the two emperors in the intervals of business. The representation of Cinna was the first of a series of master-pieces of the French stage. The emperor forbade comedies, saying that the Germans did not understand Moliere. ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... usually passed the summer at his villa of Auteuil, which is pleasantly situated at the entrance of the Bois de Boulogne. Here he took delight in assembling under his roof the most eminent geniuses of the age; especially Chapelle, Racine, Moliere, and La Fontaine. Racine the younger gives the following account of a droll circumstance that occurred at supper at Auteuil with these guests. "At this supper," he says, "at which my father was not present, the wise Boileau was no more master of himself than any of his ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... like any Encyclopedist, have to confess that my methods are no use, and would be no use if I were Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, George, Butler, and Morris all rolled into one, with Euripides, More, Moliere, Shakespear, Beaumarchais, Swift, Goethe, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Moses and the prophets all thrown in (as indeed in some sort I actually am, standing as I do on all their shoulders). The problem being to make heroes out of cowards, we paper apostles and artist-magicians have succeeded ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... you did," was her reply. We were all omnivorous readers, and the old-fashioned accomplishment of reading aloud was cultivated by both brothers and sisters. I was the only one who could translate French at sight, thanks to Miss Phin's giving me so much of Racine and Moliere and other good French authors in my ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... pages of the novel are full, the scenes of the drama are crowded with imaginary invalids. Not merely are they one of the most valuable stock properties for the humorist, but whole stories and comedies have been devoted to their exploitation, like Moliere's classic "Le Malade Imaginaire," and "Le Medecin Malgre Lui." Generation after generation has shaken its sides until they ached over these pompous old hypochondriacs and fussy old dowagers, whose one amusement in life is to enjoy ill health and discuss ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... the same time Antoine Baudeau, 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 wrote ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... operettas, and 6 ballets, and of these works 442 repetitions were given in the aggregate, making for the year 604 performances, a number of which were at popular prices. The dramas given included fifteen by Schiller, ten by Shakespeare, three by Goethe, three by Lessing, five by Moliere, four by Hans Sachs, four by Sheridan, eleven by Grillparzer, two each by Kleist and Hebbel, and several by Ibsen, while the operas included three by Beethoven, three by Cherubini, six by Mozart, three by Weber, and several by Wagner. Could an English provincial ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... other impressions from that distant time. One night we were in the Theatre Francais, and Racine's "Phedre" was to be given. I at least had never been in the Maison de Moliere before, and in such matters as acting I possessed, at twenty-three, only a very raw and country-cousinish judgment. There had been a certain amount of talk in Oxford of a new and remarkable French actress, but neither of us had really any idea of what was before us. Then the play began. ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... 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 in the piece ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... 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
... Regnard, of the old Moliere times, very good; and (what is always odd to me) as French as the French of To-day: I ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... Antiquity of fiction. In early days couched in verse. Civilisation prefers prose. Fiction, from the earlier ages, intended to convey Moral Instruction. Opinion of Aristotle defended against that of Plato. Morality in mediaeval Romance. Criticism of Mr. Frederic Harrison. Opinion of Moliere. Yet French novels usually immoral, and why. Remarks on Popery. To be avoided. Morality of Richardson and of Sir Walter Scott. Impropriety re-introduced by Charlotte Bronte. Unwillingness of Lecturer to dwell on this Topic. The Novel is now the whole of Literature. The ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... which has been busier through the centuries in making history than almost any other in France. Seen by daylight, I no longer resented the existence of a new—comparatively new—Avignon. The pretty little theatre, with its dignified statues of Corneill and Moliere, seemed to invite me kindly to go in and listen to a play by the splendidly bewigged gentlemen sitting in stone chairs on either side of the door. The clock tower with its "Jacquemart" who stiffly struck the quarter hours with an automatic arm, while his wife criticized the gesture, ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... that intense love of Ireland which is unintelligible to the many drunken blackguards with Irish names who make their nationality an excuse for their vices and their worthlessness, there is no flattery of the Irish; she writes about the Irish as Moliere wrote about the French, having ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... came the valet de chambre, who was expected to know a little of everything, from shaving and wig-making to skill in country sports, and had as much experience in all town matters as a servant out of Terence or Moliere. Last came the negro slave, who waited on my lord or my lady, with the silver collar ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... cried Napoleon, angrily, "you really surpass Harpagon, and Moliere has cause to complain that he did not know you." [Footnote: Napoleon's words.—Vide Le Normand, ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... a very quiet little town, beautifully situated, surrounded by woods and lakes. Holberg, Denmark's Moliere, founded here an academy for the sons of the nobles. The poets Hauch and Ingemann were appointed professors here. The ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... Academy in 1763, showed much original power; and it was followed up in 1771 by a noteworthy dissertation Sur les inegalites de la lumiere des satellites de Jupiter. Meantime, he had gained a high literary reputation by his Eloges of Charles V., Lacaille, Moliere, Corneille and Leibnitz, which were issued in a collected form in 1770 and 1790; he was admitted to the French Academy (February 26, 1784), and to the Academie des Inscriptions in 1785, when Fontenelle's simultaneous membership of all three Academies was renewed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... beauty is withered by age, and the colour is sullied by too common handling; but that takes nothing from the relish to an understanding man, neither does it derogate from the glory of those ancient authors, who, 'tis likely, first brought those words into that lustre.' We read in one of Moliere's most famous comedies of one who was surprised to discover that he had been talking prose all his life without being aware of it. If we knew all, we might be much more surprised to find that we had been talking poetry, without ever having so much ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... 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 the greatest nobles ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... to a hereditary taint derived from his mother, who was its victim in its most furious form; and her father 'was strongly suspected of suicide.' He was said to have resembled more his maternal grandfather than any of his father's family. The daughter of Moliere was like her father in her wit and humor. Beethoven had for a maternal grandmother an excellent musician. The mother of Mozart gave the first lessons to her son. A crowd of composers have descended from John ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... structure of paradoxical 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 ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... its civility lies in adventitious and subsidiary qualities—in the means, not in the end. It seems to me we do mean something when we say that Phidias, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, Raphael, Racine, Moliere, Poussin, Milton, Wren, Jane Austen and Mozart are highly civilized artists, and that the creators of the Gothic cathedrals and the author of the Chanson de Roland, Villon, Webster, Rembrandt, Blake, Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Whitman, ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... country by the sea, if I had not in my youth been allowed to visit 'A Virtuoso's Collection'; and yet, to the best of my recollection, it was no recalling of Hawthorne's tale, but a casual glance at the Carte du Pays de Tendre in a volume of Moliere, which first set me upon collecting the material for an ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
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