St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence Book

This is certainly a work of its time, nevertheless it is a goldmine of truly timeless meditations on prayer, violence and sacrifice - also highly quotable. Altho a man of his time as a royalist statesmen and diplomat, De Maistre seems in many ways also a relic of an age past, a truly medieval spirit and a relentless persecutor of "tous les sophismes du raisonnement", i.e. 'philosophie': "Elle dessèche, elle racornit le coeur, et lorsequ'elle endurci un homme, elle croit avoir fait un sage", which also results in lots of sharp, oftentimes hilarious, polemics against the likes of Voltaire, Locke and Rousseau: "Tout ces philosophes du dernier siècle, sans excepter même les meilleurs, sont des poltrons qui ont peur des esprits"; this does certainly not apply to De Maistre himself, which is why he seems, among all his contemporaries, one of the few sane men left.