Of the Academy:
“Happy he who has not put his hope in The Academy! Happy he who lives exempt from fears and desires, and who knows that it is equally vain to be an Academician and not to be an Academician! Such a one leads, without trouble, a life hidden and obscure. Beautiful liberty follows him everywhere. He celebrates in the shade the silent orgies of wisdom, and all the Muses smile on him as on their adept.”
“The immortality which has just been decreed to M. de Séez neither a Bossuet nor a Belzunce desires. It is not graven in the hearts of wondering peoples: it is inscribed in a big register.”
“If there are to be found, among the forty, persons of more polish than genius, what harm is there in this? Mediocrity triumphs in the Academy. Where does it not triumph? Do you find it less powerful in the parliaments and in the councils of the crown, where, surely, it is less in its place? Does one need to be a rare man to work on a dictionary which pretends to control usage and which can only follow it?
“The Académistes or Académiciens were instituted, as you know, to fix the proper usage in what concerns discourse, to purge the language of every venerable and popular impurity, and to prevent the appearance of another Rabelais, another Montaigne, tout puant la canaille, la cuistrerie, et la province.”
“Genius is something unsociable. An extraordinary man is rarely a man of resources. The Academy was very well able to do without Descartes and Pascal. Who can say that it could as easily have done without M. Godeau or M. Conrart?”
Of Justice, Courts, and Judges:
“I hold man free in his acts because my religion teaches it; but, outside the doctrine of the Church (which is unequivocal), there is so little reason to believe in human liberty that I shudder in thinking of the verdicts of a justice that punishes actions of which the motives, the order, and the causes equally elude us, in which the will has often little part, and which are sometimes accomplished unconsciously.”
“Tournebroche, my son, consider that I am speaking of human justice, which is different from the justice of God, and which is generally opposed to it.”
“The cruelest insult that men have been able to offer to our Lord Jesus Christ has been the placing of his image in the halls where the judges absolve the Pharisees who crucified him and condemn the Magdalen whom he lifted up with his divine hands.”[106]