Joseph de Maistre quotes

Joseph de Maistre was a Savoyard philosopher, diplomat, and writer, known for his conservative and counter-Enlightenment views. A prominent advocate of monarchy and the authority of the Catholic Church, his works had a significant influence on 19th-century political thought. He is remembered as one of the most important critics of the Enlightenment and modern rationalism. Here are 47 of his quotes:

False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.

Joseph de Maistre

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Joseph de Maistre

All pain is a punishment, and every punishment is inflicted for love as much as for justice.

Joseph de Maistre

Genius does not seem to derive any great support from syllogisms. Its carriage is free; its manner has a touch of inspiration. We see it come, but we never see it walk.

Joseph de Maistre

All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.

Joseph de Maistre

It is permitted to modern philosophy, all swollen up with Bacon's venom, to repeat to us to satiety, to disgust, to nausea, that we make God similar to man; we will reply as many times that is not quite the same thing to say that a man resembles his portrait or that his portrait resembles him.

Joseph de Maistre

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

Joseph de Maistre

There is no man who desires as passionately as a Russian. If we could imprison a Russian desire beneath a fortress, that fortress would explode.

Joseph de Maistre

Men never respect what they have made themselves. This is why an elective king never possesses the moral power of a hereditary sovereign, because he is not noble enough, that is to say he does not possess that kind of greatness independent of men and that is the work of time.

Joseph de Maistre

There is a great analogy between grace and genius, for genius is a grace. The real man of genius is the one who acts by grace or by impulsion, without ever contemplating himself and without ever saying to himself: Yes! It is by grace that I act.

Joseph de Maistre

Never have nations been civilized, except by religion.

Joseph de Maistre

A woman can only be superior as a woman; as soon as she wants to emulate man, she is nothing but an ape.

Joseph de Maistre

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

Joseph de Maistre

There is nothing but violence in the universe; but we are spoiled by a modern philosophy that tells us all is good, whereas evil has tainted everything, and in a very real sense, all is evil, since nothing is in its place.

Joseph de Maistre

Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not. People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man.

Joseph de Maistre

Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.

Joseph de Maistre

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

Joseph de Maistre

We are all bound to the throne of the Supreme Being by a flexible chain which restrains without enslaving us. The most wonderful aspect of the universal scheme of things is the action of free beings under divine guidance.

Joseph de Maistre

Man is so muddled, so dependent on the things immediately before his eyes, that every day even the most submissive believer can be seen to risk the torments of the afterlife for the smallest pleasure.

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 destroy it; it is given life only through the national mind, that is to say, by political faith, which is a creed.

Joseph de Maistre

If there was no moral evil upon earth, there would be no physical evil.

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 one's flesh creep.

Joseph de Maistre