Louis de Bonald > Quotes

“When God wished to punish France, he took away the Bourbons from her governance”
― Louis de Bonald

“The cry 'Liberty, equality, fraternity or death!' was much in vogue during the Revolution. Liberty ended by covering France with prisons, equality by multiplying titles and decorations, and fraternity by dividing us. Death alone prevailed.”
― Louis de Bonald

“All that is to last is slow to grow.”
― Louis de Bonald

“A government should do little for the pleasures of the people, enough for their needs, and everything for their virtues.”
― Louis de Bonald

“Monarchy considers man in his ties with society; a republic considers man independently of his relations to society.”
― Louis de Bonald

“Father, mother, child, which express both the union of the sexes and de production of the being, can only be considered dependently on one another, and relatively to one another. A woman could exist without the existence of a man; but there is no mother if there is no father, nor a child without both of them. Each one of these ways of being presumes and recalls the other two; that is to say, they are relative. Considered thus, they are called relationships, in Latin, ratio; father, mother, child are persons, and their union forms the family. The union of the sexes, which is the foundation of all these relationships, is called marriage.”
― Louis de Bonald, On Divorce

“In the social body as in every organized body — that is, one in which the parts are arranged in certain relationships to each other relative to a given end — the cessation of vital functions does not come from the annihilation of their parts, but from their displacement and the disturbances of their relationships.”
― Louis de Bonald, On Divorce

“There was geometry in the world before Newton, and philosophy before Descartes, but before language there was absolutely nothing but bodies and their images, because language is the necessary instrument of every intellectual operation – nay, the means of every moral existence.”
― Louis de Bonald

“Marriage is therefore not an ordinary contract, since in terminating it, the two parties cannot return themselves to the same state they were in before entering into it. And if the contract is voluntary at the time it is entered into, it can no longer be voluntary, and almost never is, at the time of its termination, since the party which manifests the desire to dissolve it takes all liberty from the other party to refuse, and has only too many means to force its consent.”
― Louis de Bonald, On Divorce