Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molière
Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molière (1622-1673) was a great French comic dramatist, born in Paris. He studied law and passed for the bar, but evinced from the first a proclivity for the theatre, and soon associated with actors, and found his vocation as a writer of plays, which procured him the friendship of La Fontaine, Boileau, and other distinguished men, though he incurred the animosity of many classes of society by the ridicule which he heaped on their weaknesses and their pretensions, the more that in his satires his characters are rather abstract types of men than concrete individualities.His principal works are, "Les Précieuses Ridicules," "L'École des Femmes," "Le Tartuffe," "Le Misanthrope," "George Dandin," "L'Avare," "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme," "Les Fourberies de Scapin," "Le Malade malgré Lui," "Les Femmes Savantes," and "Le Malade Imaginaire". Though seriously ill, he took part in the performance of this last, but the effort was too much for him, and he died that night. From the grudge which the priests bore him for his satires on them he was buried without a religious service.
Wisdom & Quotes
- Of course heaven forbids certain pleasures, but one finds means of compromise.
- We are easily duped by those we love.
- Men are all alike in their promises. It is only in their deeds that they differ.
- He must have killed a lot of people to have gotten so rich.
- Nearly all men die of their medicines, and not of their illnesses.
- Being a hypocrite has marvellous advantages!
- There's nothing like tobacco; it is the passion of all decent men; a man who lives without tobacco does not deserve to live.
- All fashionable vices pass for virtues.
- My heavens! I've been talking prose for the last forty years without knowing it.
- Pure reason avoids extremes, and requires one to be wise in moderation.
- Virtue in this world should be malleable.
- Things are only worth what you make them worth.
- I prefer an accommodating vice to an obstinate virtue.
Blaise Pascal