Jacques Delille

I love to dream, but do not wish
To have a pin prick rouse me.

Jacques Delille (June 22, 1738 – May 1, 1813) was a French poet and translator.

Quotes

• Le sort fait les parents, le choix fait les amis.
  • Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends.
  • Malheur at Pitié (1803), canto I

• Ici nous ignorons dans quel climat nous sommes ;
  ici nous ignorons et les lieux et les hommes :
  des honneurs solennels vous paîront vos bienfaits.
  • Tr. of Ignari hominumque locorumque erramus, vento huc vastis et fluctibus acti: multa tibi ante aras nostra cadet hostia dextra. — L'Énéide (Virgil, Aeneid, bk. 1, 325)
  • Instruct us of what skies, or what world's end, our storm-swept lives have found! Strange are these lands and people where we rove, compelled by wind and wave. Lo, this right hand shall many a victim on thine altar slay! — Virgil, Aeneid. Theodore C. Williams. trans. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1910)
  • But tell a stranger, long in tempests toss'd, what earth we tread, and who commands the coast? Then on your name shall wretched mortals call, and offer'd victims at your altars fall. — Virgil, Aeneid, John Dryden]. trans. (1697)

A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedness (1902)

Edited by J. de Finod. New York: D. Appleton and Co.

• Modesty is the grace of the soul.
  • p. 75

• Fate gives us parents; choice gives us friends.
  • p. 108

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922)

• J'aime à réver, mais ne veux pas
  Qu'à coups d'épingle on me réveille.
  • I love to dream, but do not wish
    To have a pin prick rouse me.
  • La Conversation (pp. 815-16)

• Tremblez, tyrans, vous êtes immortels.
  • Tremble, ye tyrants, for ye can not die.
  • L'Immortalité de l'Âme (p. 825)

• Il ne voit que la nuit, n'entend que le silence.
  • He sees only night, and hears only silence.
  • Imagination, IV (p. ___?)