Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) was a French writer, academician, polymath, and philosopher. Many of the unique ideas of the Age of Enlightenment originated in embryonic form in his works.
Born in Rouen, Normandy, Fontenelle was a nephew of the French dramatists Pierre and Thomas Corneille. Educated at the Jesuit College in Rouen, Fontenelle began his literary career in Paris. In the great spat between the Moderns and the Ancients, Fontenelle sided with the Moderns, attacking the Greeks and their French imitators. In response, he challenged the satiric attacks of such intellects as Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, Jean Racine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jean de La Bruyère.
After the failure on the stage of his tragedy Aspar (1680,) Fontenelle produced an imitation of the satirist Lucian, Nouveaux Dialogues des morts (1682; New Dialogues of the Dead, 1684–85) and Lettres Galantes De Monsieur Le Chevalier D’Her (1687; Letters of Gallantry, 1715.)
In 1697, Fontenelle was made permanent secretary to the French Académie des Sciences, of which he was later president. In these roles, he exerted a considerable influence on the French Enlightenment and the Encyclopédistes.
Fontenelle endeavored in almost every form of literature—pastoral poetry, satires, dialogues, tragedies, histories, scientific treatise, and critical essays. His Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686; Discourse on the Plurality of Worlds, 1688,) Histoire des oracles (1686; A History of the Oracles, 1688,) and De l’origine des fables (1724; On the Origin of Fables) are considered his principal works.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
If I had my hand full of truth, I would take good care how I opened it.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Topics: Truth
A well cultivated mind is made up of all the minds of preceding ages; it is only the one single mind educated by all previous time.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Topics: The Mind, Originality
Men of all ages have the same inclinations over which reason exercises no control. Thus wherever men are found there are follies, aye, and the same follies.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
If I held all the thoughts of the world in my hand, I would be careful not to open it.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Topics: Thoughts, Thinking, Thought
Hardly anyone knows how much is gained by ignoring the future.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Topics: The Future, Tomorrow
There are three things I have loved but never understood. Art, music and women.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Topics: Understanding
Leibnitz has obtained this fruit from his great reading, that he has a mind better exercised for receiving all sorts of ideas, more susceptible of all forms, more accessible to that which is new and even opposed to him, more indulgent to human weakness, more disposed to favorable interpretations, and more industrious to find them.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Topics: Reading
The magnificent and the ridiculous are so close that they touch.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Topics: Happiness
In vain we shall penetrate more and more deeply the secrets of the structure of the human body, we shall not dupe nature; we shall die as usual.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Topics: the Body
We must always skim over pleasures. They are like marshy lands that we must travel nimbly, hardly daring to put down our feet.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Topics: Pleasure
Women react differently: a French woman who sees herself betrayed by her husband will kill his mistress; an Italian will kill her husband; a Spaniard will kill both; and a German will kill herself.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
It is the passions that do and undo everything.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
It is the passions of men that both do and undo everything. — They are the winds that are necessary to put every thing in motion, though they often cause storms.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
To despise theory is to have the excessively vain pretension to do without knowing what one does, and to speak without knowing what one says.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
To be happy, one must have a good stomach and a bad heart.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Topics: Happiness
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