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.

• 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; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 815-16.

• Tremblez, tyrans, vous êtes immortels.
  • Tremble, ye tyrants, for ye can not die.
  • L'Immortalité de l'Âme; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 825.

• Il ne voit que la nuit, n'entend que le silence.
  • He sees only night, and hears only silence.
  • Imagination, IV; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. ___? (Silence).

• 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, livre premier (Virgil A. 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! — Vergil, Aeneid. Theodore C. Williams. trans. Boston. 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. — Vergil, Aeneid. John Dryden. trans.