Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Pasquier Quesnel

French Jansenist Theologian

"A just person knows how to secure his own reputation without blemishing another’s by exposing his faults."

"Anger causes us often to condemn in one what we approve in another."

"Truth irritates those only whom it enlightens but does not convert."

"Zeal is very blind, or badly regulated, when it encroaches upon the rights of others."

"Behold affronts and indignities which the world thinks it right never to pardon, which the Son of God endures with a divine meekness! Let us cast at the feet of Jesus that false honor, that quick sense of affronts, which exaggerates everything, and pardons nothing, and, above all, that devilish determination in resenting injuries."

"Care may acquire wealth, which, when acquired, care must guard and worry about."

"Men are more inclined to ask curious questions than to obtain necessary instruction."

"There is no greater punishment than that of being abandoned to one’s self."

"We pass our life in deliberation, and we die upon it."