If you say to me: “Master, it would seem that you weren’t too terribly wise to have written these bits of nonsense and pleasant mockeries,” I respond that you are hardly more so in finding amusement in reading them.
Time, which gnaws and diminisheth all things else, augments and increaseth benefits; because a noble action of liberality, done to a man of reason, doth grow continually by his generous thinking of it and remembering it.
When undertaking marriage, everyone must be the judge of his own thoughts, and take counsel from himself.
The right moment wears a full head of hair: when it has been missed, you can’t get it back; it’s bald in the back of the head and never turns around.
No clock is more regular than the belly.
There is no truer cause of unhappiness amongst men than, where naturally expecting charity and benevolence, they receive harm and vexation.
How do you know antiquity was foolish? How do you know the present is wise? Who made it foolish? Who made it wise?
Tell the truth and shame the devil.
From the gut comes the strut, and where hunger reigns, strength abstains.
Believe me, ’tis a godlike thing to lend; to owe is a heroic virtue.
I won’t undertake war until I have tried all the arts and means of peace.
Misery is the company of lawsuits.
If in your soil it takes, to heaven A thousand thousand thanks be given; And say with France, it goodly goes, Where the Pantagruelion grows.
We will take the good-will for the deed.
Such is the nature and make-up of the French that they are only good at the start. Then they are worse than devils, but, given time, they’re less than women.
Indeed, said the monk, a mass, a matins, and vespers well rung are half-said.
Thought I to myself, we shall never come off scot-free.
Pantagruel was telling me that he believed the queen had given the symbolic word used among her subjects to denote sovereign good cheer, when she said to her tabachins, A panacea.
Plain as a nose in a man’s face.
Can there be any greater dotage in the world than for one to guide and direct his courses by the sound of a bell, and not by his own judgment.
If you understand why a monkey in a family is always mocked and harassed, you understand why monks are rejected by all – both old and young.