Rabelais Quotes

One falls to the ground in trying to sit on two stools. ~ Francois Rabelais

If I fall asleep, it is because I am overloaded. I sleep because one hour with Henry contains five years of my life, and one phrase, one caress answers the expectations of a hundred nights. When I hear him laugh, I say, "I have heard Rabelais.". And I swallow his laughter like bread and wine. ~ Anais Nin

The Lord forbid that I should be out of debt, as if indeed I could not be trusted. ~ Francois Rabelais

Science without conscience is the death of the soul. ~ Francois Rabelais

Panurge stood beside the galley with an oar in his hand, not to help the herdsmen but to prevent from from somehow clambering aboard and thus escaping their death, and all the while preached to them eloquently . . . with rhetorical flourishes about the miseries of this world and the blessings of the next, affirming that those who had passed on to that place were happier than those who lived on in this vale of tears. ~ Francois Rabelais

Si vous faîtes attention aux signes, quand donc ferez vous attention à ce qu'ils signifient?

If you pay attention to the signs, but when will you pay attention to what they signify? ~ Francois Rabelais

A bellyful is a bellyful. ~ Francois Rabelais

How can I govern others, who can't even govern myself? ~ Francois Rabelais

Bring down the curtain, the farce is over ~ Francois Rabelais

I drink for the thirst to come. ~ Francois Rabelais

Oh how unhappy is the prince served by such men who are so easily corrupted. ~ Francois Rabelais

So much is a man worth as he esteems himself. ~ Francois Rabelais

All's well in the end, if you've only the patience to wait. ~ Francois Rabelais

I never sleep comfortably except when I am at sermon or when I pray to God. ~ Francois Rabelais

if my memory serves me right, here is my genealogical line: Boccaccio, Petronius, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoievsky (and other Russian writers of the Nineteenth Century), the ancient Greek dramatists, theElizabethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare), Theodore Dreiser, Knut Hamsun, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Elie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, Van Gogh, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Celine, everything I read on Zen Buddhism, everything I read about China, India, Tibet, Arabia, Africa, and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was the language of the Bible rather than its "message" which I got first and which I will never shake off. ~ Henry Miller

Few and signally blessed are those whom Jupiter has destined to be cabbage-planters. For they've always one foot on the ground andthe other not far from it. Anyone is welcome to argue about felicity and supreme happiness. But the man who plants cabbages I now positively declare to be the happiest of mortals. ~ Francois Rabelais

At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments. ~ Teju Cole

When I drink, I think; and when I think, I drink. ~ Francois Rabelais

The right moment wears a full head of hair: when it has been missed, you can't get it back; it's bald in the back of the head and never turns around. ~ Francois Rabelais

Time, which gnaws and diminisheth all things else, augments and increaseth benefits; because a noble action of liberality, done to a man of reason, doth grow continually by his generous thinking of it and remembering it. ~ Francois Rabelais

I drink no more than a sponge. ~ Francois Rabelais

Gestures, in love, are incomparably more attractive, effective and valuable than words. ~ Francois Rabelais

This year there will be an eclipse of the Moon on the fourth day of August.9 Saturn will be retrograde; Venus, direct; Mercury, variable. And a mass of other planets will not proceed as they used to.10 As a result, crabs this year will walk sideways, rope-makers work backwards, stools end up on benches, and pillows be found at the foot of the bed;11 many men's bollocks will hang down for lack of a game-bag;12 the belly will go in front and the bum be the first to sit down; nobody will find the bean in their Twelfth Night cake; not one ace will turn up in a flush; the dice will never do what you want, however much you may flatter them;13 and the beasts will talk in sundry places. ~ Francois Rabelais

The canons of literary taste as they have hardened in the twentieth century leave little place for Rabelais. ~ Roger Shattuck

I do not drink more than a sponge. ~ Francois Rabelais

A little rain beats down a big wind. Long drinking bouts break open the tun(der). ~ Francois Rabelais

According to true military art, one should never push one's enemy to the point of despair, because such a state multiplies his strength and increases his courage which had already been crushed and failing, and because there is no better remedy for the health of beaten and overwhelmed men than the absence of all hope. ~ Francois Rabelais

To laugh is proper to man. ~ Francois Rabelais

Remove idleness from the world and soon the arts of Cupid would perish. ~ Francois Rabelais

Believe me, 'tis a godlike thing to lend; to owe is a heroic virtue. ~ Francois Rabelais

Do you know what Agelisas said, when he was asked why the great city of Lacedomonie was not girded with walls? Because, pointing out the inhabitants and citizens of the city, so expert in military discipline and so strong and well armed: "Here," he said, "are the walls of the city," meaning that there is no wall but of bones, and that towns and cities can have no more secure nor stronger wall than the virtue of their citizens and inhabitants. ~ Francois Rabelais

Look not too long in the face of the fire O man!...believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. Tomorrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp - all others but liars!
Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's dismal swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean which is the dark side of this Earth, and which is two thirds of this Earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true - not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was The Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. 'All is vanity'. ALL. The wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing grave yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rosseau, poor devils all sick of men; and throughout a carefree lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; - not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb stones, and break the green damp mould unfathomable wounderous Solomon. ~ Herman Melville

A certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune. ~ Francois Rabelais

Everything comes in time to those who can wait. ~ Francois Rabelais

Death is the vast perhaps. ~ Francois Rabelais

I have known many who could not when they would, for they had not done it when they could. ~ Francois Rabelais

With the motto "do what you will," Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau's Alector, Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, López de Úbeda's Justina, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Béroalde de Verville's Fantastic Tales, Sorel's Francion, Burton's Anatomy, Swift's Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, Fielding's Tom Jones, Amory's John Buncle, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the novels of Diderot and maybe Voltaire (a late convert), Smollett's Adventures of an Atom, Hoffmann's Tomcat Murr, Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Southey's Doctor, Melville's Moby-Dick, Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Rolfe's ornate novels, Bely's Petersburg, Joyce's Ulysses, Witkiewicz's Polish jokes, Flann O'Brien's Irish farces, Philip Wylie's Finnley Wren, Patchen's tender novels, Burroughs's and Kerouac's mad ones, Nabokov's later works, Schmidt's fiction, the novels of Durrell, Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), Gaddis and Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Brossard's later works, the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism (Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palin ~ Steven Moore

Baste! enough! I sup, I wet, I humect, I moisten my gullet, I drink, and all for fear of dying. Drink always and you shall never die. ~ Francois Rabelais

a child is a fire to be lit, not a vase to be filled ~ Francois Rabelais

Men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition, by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude, wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden, and to desire what is denied us. ~ Francois Rabelais

If you wish to avoid seeing a fool you must first break your looking glass. ~ Francois Rabelais

All things have their ends and cycles. And when they have reached their highest point, they are in their lowest ruin, for they cannot last for long in such a state. Such is the end for those who cannot moderate their fortune and prosperity with reason and temperance. ~ Francois Rabelais

Ha! for a divine and lordly manor, there is nothing like solid ground. ~ Francois Rabelais

Science without conscience is the soul's perdition. ~ Francois Rabelais

When my soul leaves this human dwelling, I will not consider myself to have completely died, but to pass from one state to another, given that, in you and by you, I remain in my visible image in this world. ~ Francois Rabelais

Bottle, whose Mysterious Deep Do's ten thousand Secrets keep, With attentive Ear I wait; Ease my Mind, and speak my Fate. ~ Francois Rabelais

How comes it that you curse, Frere Jean? It's only, said the monk, in order to embellish my language. They are the colors of Ciceronian rhetoric. ~ Francois Rabelais

The round, unformed script on the fly-leaf said, Francis Crawford of Lymond. She stared at it; then put it down and picked up another. The writing in this one was older; the neat level hand she had seen once before, in Stamboul. This time it said only, The Master of Culter.

That dated it after the death of his father, when until the birth of Richard's son Kevin, the heir's rank and title were Lymond's. And all the books were his, too. She scanned them: some works in English; others in Latin and Greek, French, Italian and Spanish.… Prose and verse. The classics, pressed together with folios on the sciences, theology, history; bawdy epistles and dramas; books on war and philosophy; the great legends. Sheets and volumes and manuscripts of unprinted music. Erasmus and St Augustine, Cicero, Terence and Ptolemy, Froissart and Barbour and Dunbar; Machiavelli and Rabelais, Bude and Bellenden, Aristotle and Copernicus, Duns Scotus and Seneca.

Gathered over the years; added to on infrequent visits; the evidence of one man's eclectic taste. And if one studied it, the private labyrinth, book upon book, from which the child Francis Crawford had emerged, contained, formidable, decorative as his deliberate writing, as the Master of Culter. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

The belly has no ears nor is it to be filled with fair words. ~ Francois Rabelais

Such is the nature and make-up of the French that they are only good at the start. Then they are worse than devils, but, given time, they're less than women. ~ Francois Rabelais

A habit does not a monk make. ~ Francois Rabelais

Friends, you will notice that in this world there are many more ballocks than men. Remember this. ~ Francois Rabelais

Thought I to myself, we shall never come off scot-free. ~ Francois Rabelais

Go, all of you poor people, in the name of God the Creator, and let him forever be your guide. And henceforth, do not be beguiledby these idle and useless pilgrimages. See to your families, and work, each one of you, in your vocation, raise your children, and live as the good Apostle Paul teaches you. ~ Francois Rabelais

You have no obligation under the sun other than to discover your real needs, to fulfill them, and to rejoice in doing so. ~ Francois Rabelais

Gargantua, at the age of four hundred four score and forty- four years begat his son Pantagruel, from his wife, named Badebec, daughter of the King of the Amaurotes in Utopia, who died in child-birth: because he was marvelously huge and so heavy that he could not come to light without suffocating his mother. ~ Francois Rabelais

I have already related to you great and admirable things; but, if you might be induced to adventure upon the hazard of believing some other divinity of this sacred Pantagruelion, I very willingly would tell it you. Believe it, if you will, or otherwise, believe it not, I care not which of them you do, they are both alike to me. It shall be sufficient for my purpose to have told you the truth, and the truth I will tell you. ~ Francois Rabelais

His books were part of him. Each year of his life, it seemed, his books became more and more a part of him. This room, thirty by twenty feet, and the walls of shelves filled with books, had for him the murmuring of many voices. In the books of Herodotus, Tacitus, Rabelais, Thomas Browne, John Milton, and scores of others, he had found men of face and voice more real to him than many a man he had met for a smoke and a talk. ~ Carl Sandburg

Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I'd rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous. ~ Francois Rabelais

there are more fools than wise men in all societies, and the larger party always gains the upper hand ~ Francois Rabelais

The probity that scintillizes in the superfices of your persons informs my ratiocinating faculty, in a most stupendous manner, of the radiant virtues latent within the precious caskets and ventricles of your minds. ~ Francois Rabelais

His religion at best is an anxious wish,-like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps. ~ John Keats

Fate leads the willing, and th' unwilling draws. ~ Francois Rabelais

I know of a charm by way of a prayer that will preserve a man from the violence of guns and all manner of fire-weapons and engines but it will do me no good because I do not believe it ~ Francois Rabelais

One should never pursue the hazards of fortune to their very ends andit behooves all adventurers to treat their good luck with reverence, neither bothering nor upsetting it. ~ Francois Rabelais

How do you know antiquity was foolish? How do you know the present is wise? Who made it foolish? Who made it wise? ~ Francois Rabelais

Can there be any greater dotage in the world than for one to guide and direct his courses by the sound of a bell, and not by his own judgment. ~ Francois Rabelais

The remedy for thirst? It is the opposite of the one for a dog bite: run always after a dog, he'll never bite you; drink always before thirst, and it will never overtake you. ~ Francois Rabelais

It is the custom on Africa to always produce new and monstrous things.
[Fr., Afrique est coustumiere toujours choses produire nouvelles et monstrueuses.] ~ Francois Rabelais

Indeed, said the monk, a mass, a matins, and vespers well rung are half-said. ~ Francois Rabelais

The age was still dark and reeked of the havoc and misfortunes of the Goths who had put all good literature to destruction. But, by God's goodness, in my time light and dignity were returned to letters, and I see there such improvement that today I would have great difficulty being admitted to the most elementary classes
I, who in my time was reputed to be (and not wrongly) to be the most knowledgeable person of the century. ~ Francois Rabelais

I drink eternally. For me it is an eternity of drinking, and a drinking up of eternity. ~ Francois Rabelais

Don't limp in front of the lame. ~ Francois Rabelais

There is no truer cause of unhappiness amongst men than, where naturally expecting charity and benevolence, they receive harm and vexation. ~ Francois Rabelais

A man of good sense always believes what he is told, and what he finds written down. ~ Francois Rabelais

because men that are free,well born,well bred,and conversant in honest companies have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions,and withdraws them from vice which is called honor ~ Francois Rabelais

I'd gladly do without a valet. I'm never so well treated as when I'm without a valet. ~ Francois Rabelais

I have a remedy against thirst, quite contrary to that which is good against the biting of a mad dog. Keep running after a dog, and he will never bite you; drink always before the thirst, and it will never come upon you. ~ Francois Rabelais

It is said, proverbially, that happy is the doctor who is called in when the disease is on its way out. ~ Francois Rabelais

Early rising is no pleasure; early drinking's just the measure. ~ Francois Rabelais

Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift ... The net result of Naked Lunch will be to make people shudder at their own lies, will be to make them open up and be straight with one another. Swift and Rabelais and Sterne accomplished a step in that direction, and Burroughs another. ~ Jack Kerouac

Misery is the company of lawsuits. ~ Francois Rabelais

For God, nothing is impossible. And, if he wanted, in the future women would give birth from their ears. ~ Francois Rabelais

If you want to avoid seeing an idiot, break the mirror. ~ Francois Rabelais

it's that particular connection between melancholy and humor that Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl examined in Saturn and Melancholy (1964). Just as melancholy is sadness made light, so humor is comedy that has lost its physical weight (that dimension of human carnality that, however, makes Boccaccio and Rabelais great) and casts doubts on the self, the world, and the entire network of relations they form. ~ Italo Calvino

Appetite comes with eating ... but thirst goes away with drinking. ~ Francois Rabelais

So that we may not be like the Athenians, who never consulted except after the event done.
[Fr., Afin que ne semblons es Athenians, qui ne consultoient jamais sinon apres le cas faict.] ~ Francois Rabelais

A child is not a vase to be filled, but a fire to be lit. ~ Francois Rabelais

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality. W ~ Harold Bloom

War begun without good provision of money beforehand for going through with it is but as a breathing of strength and blast that will quickly pass away. Coin is the sinews of war. ~ Francois Rabelais

If the bookseller happens to desire a privilege for his merchandise, whether he is selling Rabelais or the Fathers of the Church, the magistrate grants the privilege without answering for the contents of the book. - Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire ~ Voltaire

The most Christian France is the sole wet-nurse to the Roman court. ~ Francois Rabelais

In their rules there was only one clause: Do what you will. ~ Francois Rabelais

The dress does not make the monk.
[Fr., L'habit ne fait le moine.] ~ Francois Rabelais

I am going to seek the great Perhaps. ~ Francois Rabelais

Nature made the day for exercise, work and seeing to one's business; and ... it provides us with a candle, which is to say the bright and joyous light of the sun. ~ Francois Rabelais

One inch of joy surmounts of grief a span, Because to laugh is proper to the man. ~ Francois Rabelais

Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him. ~ Edward Abbey

Keep running after a dog and he will never bite you. ~ Francois Rabelais

If on a friend's bookshelf
You cannot find Joyce or Sterne
Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton,
You are in danger, face the fact,
So kick him first or punch him hard
And from him hide behind a curtain. ~ Alexander Theroux