Jean Antoine Petit-Senn (1792–1870) was a poet of French-Swiss origin. He was a thorough Genevese and a biting satirist, a pensive poet, the Genevese La Bruy?re, as he liked to be called, but was not fully appreciated till after his death, when his widely scattered writings were brought together.
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Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue in the eyes of bigots.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Topics: Hypocrisy
Conscience serves us especially to judge of the actions of others.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Topics: Conscience
An angry woman is vindictive beyond measure, and hesitates at nothing in her bitterness.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Topics: Bitterness
Money dishonestly acquired is never worth its cost, while a good conscience never costs as much as it is worth.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Topics: Honesty
There are some critics who change everything that comes under their hands to gold; but to this privilege of Midas they join sometimes his ears.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Topics: Critics
Every generous illusion of youth leaves a wrinkle as it departs. Experience is the successive disenchanting of the things of life; it is reason enriched with the heart’s spoils.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Selected thoughts depend for their flavor upon the terseness of their expression, for thoughts are grains of sugar or salt, that must be melted in a drop of water.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Let us repect gray hairs, especially our own.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Topics: Age
Marriage with a good woman is a harbor in the tempest of life; with a bad woman, it is a tempest in the harbor.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Topics: Marriage
When our friends are alive, we see the good qualities they lack; dead, we remember only those they possessed.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Topics: Friendship
There are wounds of self-love which one does not confess to one’s dearest friends.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice; it whitens only the hair.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Topics: Age, Aging
Conscience whispers, but interest screams aloud.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Topics: Self-Control
Modesty and the dew love the shade. Each shines in the open day only to be exhaled to heaven.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
We tire of those pleasures we take, but never of those we give.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Love with old men is as the sun upon the snow, it dazzles more than it warms them.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Topics: Love
Envy, like flame, blackens that which is above it, and which it cannot reach.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Topics: Gratitude, Wealth, Appreciation, Blessings
Another life, if it were not better than this, would be less a promise than a threat.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
If I were rich, says one, “I would — “Illusion! — We often hold firmer to the last crown we have amassed than to the first which we gained.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Topics: Riches
It requires less character to discover the faults of others than is does to tolerate them.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
What we gain by experience is not worth that we lose in illusion
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
People who declare that they belong to no party certainly do not belong to ours.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
In all that surrounds him the egotist sees only the frame of his own portrait.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Topics: Humility
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