Quotes: Reign of Louis XIV

Since correct quotations are always somewhat obscure feel free to comment if you have heard that a certain quote has been attributed to someone else.

"Why do you weep? Did you think I was immortal?"

Louis XIV on his deathbed 

"They will have to reckon with me and I shall be their queen"

Marie Adélaïde of Savoy

"You will assist me with counsels when I ask for them"

Louis XIV (to his ministers) 

"We are never satisfied with having done well; and in endeavouring to do better, we do much worse"

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné 

"The greatest weakness of all weaknesses is to fear too much to appear weak"

Jacques-Bénigne Bousset

"This is the only grief she has ever caused me"

Louis XIV (on the death of Marie Thérèse)

"At court, far from regarding ambition as a sin, people regard it as a virtue, or if it passes for a vice, then it is regarded as the sin of great souls, and the sins of great souls are preferred to the virtues of the simple and the small"

Louis Bourdaloue 

"If by the shedding of my blood , I could have prevented my son's marriage, I would willingly have done so"

Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate

"I must enjoy myself , because I cannot enjoy myself long, for I shall die this year"

Marie Adélaïde of Savoy (coincidentally in the year she died)

"I care not that he loves me but that he marries me"

Françoise Marie de Bourbon (daughter of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan)

"My cousin, when one is so loaded with laurels as you, one cannot walk but with difficulty"

Louis XIV to the Grand Condé

"I could easier reconcile all of Europe than two women" 

Louis XIV

"As you know, God is usually on the side of the big squadrons against the small"

Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy 

"I ought to weep for his birth far more than for his death"

Louise de La Vallière (on learning of her son's death) 

"Eloquence: saying the proper thing and stopping"

François de La Rochefoucauld, Duc de La Rochefoucauld 

"If I was not a king, I should lose my temper"

Louis XIV (upon learning of the Duc de Lauzun's insolence to the Grand Dauphin) 

"Great rogues hang the little ones"

Cardinal Mazarin

"Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised"

François de La Rochefoucauld, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

 "I believe that the histories that will be written about this court after we are gone will be better and more entertaining than any novel, and I am afraid that those who come after us  will not be able to believe them and think they are just fairy tales"

Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate