Jules Michelet Quotes

Achieving a goal is nothing. The getting there is everything.

Woman is a miracle of divine contradictions

He who would confine his thought to present time will not understand present reality.

That the French Revolution was essentially a religious phenomenon was only seen with clarity by Joseph de Maistre and Jules Michelet.

Each epoch dreams the one to follow.

Man hunts and fights. Woman contrives and dreams; she is the mother of fancy, of the gods.

El hombre caza y lucha. La mujer intriga y sueña; es la madre de la fantasía de los dioses. Posee la segunda visión, las alas que le permiten volar hacía el infinito del deseo y de la imaginación.

He who knows how to be poor knows everything.

Before the play begins, observe the theater.

Alexander and Caesar have had this in common: to be loved and wept by the conquered, and to perish by the hands of their own countrymen. Such men have no country; they belong to the world.

The Sabbat arose as a conspiracy to destroy the rotten edifice of Church and State, meeting on the heath to avoid the gaze of authority, guised in anonymity and foreboding. This revolutionized the nature of witchcraft, regardless of the pre-existence of the Sabbat form. I do not simply refer here to the inspiring fantasies of Jules Michelet, but the important modern work of Silvia Federici. We see the same attacks on freedom of assembly in the destruction of the free festivals, rave culture and the occupy movement. These have been met by the masked Anonymous, the faceless black bloc anarchists, the direct actions of the ELF. These are expressions of popular witchcraft and have been persecuted by the same inquisition that came for us. I do not say that these are examples of operative witchcraft, I say that we, the people who are the Witchcraft, have a sacred duty to join this war. We need to celebrate Grand Sabbats again, infuse them with our witchblood, our cunning.

It is our harsh fate on earth that body and soul should be so closely bound together; that the soul should have to drag the body along, should be exposed to its vicissitudes, should even respond to them. This primal curse has always weighed heavily upon us; but how much more heavily under a religious law which compels us to endure this outrageous condition; which will not permit our honor, when it is imperiled, to save itself by casting aside the body, and seeking refuge in the world of the spirit!

L'homme, c'etait Thuriot, un dogue terrible, de la race de Danton; nous le retrouverons deux fois, au comencement et à la fin; sa parole est deux fois mortelle: el tue la Bastille, il tue Robespierre.

POSSESSION L'âge terrible, c'est l'âge d'or. J'appelle ainsi la dure époque où l'or eut son avènement. C'est l'an 1300, sous le règne du beau roi qu'on put croire d'or ou de fer, qui ne dit jamais un mot, grand roi qui parut avoir un démon muet, mais de bras puissant, assez fort pour brûler le Temple, assez fort pour atteindre Rome et d'un gant de fer porter le premier souffle au pape. L'or devient alors le grand pape, le grand dieu. Non sans raison. Le mouvement a commencé sur l'Europe par la croisade. On n'estime de richesse que celle qui a des ailes et se prête au mouvement, celle des échanges rapides. Le roi, pour frapper ses coups à distance ne veut que de l'or.

El hombre caza y lucha. La mujer intriga y sueña; es la madre de la fantasía, de los dioses. Posee la segunda visión, las alas que le permiten volar hacia el infinito del deseo y de la imaginación. Los dioses son como hombres: nacen y mueren sobre el pecho de una mujer.

If we accept the proposition that one person can be sacrificed for the happiness of the many, it will soon be demonstrated that two or three or more could also be sacrificed for the happiness of the many. Little by little, we will find reasons for sacrificing the many for the happiness of the many, and we will think it was a bargain.

It was one thing to talk of using technology to topple the authority of the aristocracy and the Church, but who or what would replace them? Diderot and the French revolutionaries had assumed it would be “the people.” But as the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet once wryly observed, “The people, in its highest ideal, is difficult to find in the people.” As

Man hunts and struggles. Woman intrigues and dreams; she is the mother of fantasy, the mother of the gods. She has second sight, the wings that enable her to fly to the infinite of desire and the imagination… The gods are like men: they are born and they die on a woman’s breast…

Heaven itself had little terror for them; they returned its thunders with flights of arrows. Did ocean rise and invade the land, they did not refuse its challenge, but marched upon it sword in hand. Never to give way was their point of honor: they would scorn to quit a house in flames. No people held their lives cheaper. There were of them who would undertake to die for a trifle of money or a little wine, would step upon their sleeping places, distribute the wine or money among their friends, lie down on their shields, and offer their throat to the knife.

And such is the power of the organization so introduced, that even when life shall appear to desert it, and its destruction by the barbarians inevitable, they will submit to its yoke. Despite themselves, they must dwell under the everlasting roofs which mock their efforts at destruction: they will bow the head, and, victors as they are, receive laws from vanquished Rome. ... Such is the work of civil order.

Todos los pueblos primitivos empiezan de la misma manera, como lo vemos por los viajes. El hombre caza y combate. La mujer piensa e imagina, engendra a los sueños y a los dioses; ciertos días se vuelve vidente, roza el infinito del deseo y del sueño. Para contar mejor el tiempo, el observa el cielo, sin perder su interés por la tierra. Cuando joven y hermosa contempla las flores amorosas y las conoce muy bien. Más tarde, ya mujer, las utiliza para curar a aquellos que ama. ¡Así de sencillo es el inicio de las religiones y de las ciencias! Más tarde todo se complicará; veremos aparecer a los especialistas: juglar, astrólogo o profeta, nigromante, sacerdote, médico. Pero en el principio, la mujer lo era todo.

Porque la risa es una función esencial de nuestra naturaleza. ¿Cómo soportar la vida si no podemos reír, al menos en los intervalos entre nuestros dolores?

El domingo, después del oficio, había bastantes enfermos; pedían socorros y se les daba sólo palabras: -Has pecado y Dios te aflige. Da gracias, menos tendrás que sufrir en la otra vida. Resígnate, sufre, muere. La Iglesia tiene plegarias para sus difuntos.- Débiles, desmadejados, sin esperanza, ni ganas de vivir, seguían bien este consejo y dejaban escapar la vida.

Especialmente la medicina era un culto satánico porque lucha contra la enfermedad que era un merecido castigo de Dios, porque al curar el cuerpo se obstaculizaba el camino del alma hacia el cielo.

«Kind-hearted men, ye who weep over the evils of the Revolution (doubtless with too much reason), also shed a few tears for the evils which occasioned it.»