François Fénelon

Who was François Fénelon?

François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, more commonly known as François Fénelon, was a French Roman Catholic archbishop, theologian, poet and writer. He today is remembered mostly as the author of The Adventures of Telemachus, first published in 1699.

Famous Quotes:

• The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips.
• Do not make best friends with a melancholy sad soul. They always are heavily loaded, and you must bear half.
• Children are excellent observers, and will often perceive your slightest defects. In general, those who govern children, forgive nothing in them, but everything in themselves.
• How rare it is to find a soul quiet enough to hear God speak.
• Little opportunities should be improved.
• Nothing will make us so charitable and tender to the faults of others, as, by self-examination, thoroughly to know our own.
• All earthly delights are sweeter in expectation than in enjoyment; but all spiritual pleasures more in fruition than in expectation.
• If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdom of Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.
• Most people I ask little from. I try to give them much, and expect nothing in return and I do very well in the bargain.
• Had we not faults of our own, we should take less pleasure in complaining of others.