318 quotes found
"Achilles exists only through Homer. Take away the art of writing from this world, and you will probably take away its glory."
"I am Bourbon as a matter of honour, royalist according to reason and conviction, and republican by taste and character."
"In living literature no person is a competent judge but of works written in his own language. I have expressed my opinion concerning a number of English writers; it is very possible that I may be mistaken, that my admiration and my censure may be equally misplaced, and that my conclusions may appear impertinent and ridiculous on the other side of the Channel."
"Perfect works are rare, because they must be produced at the happy moment when taste and genius unite; and this rare conjuncture, like that of certain planets, appears to occur only after the revolution of several cycles, and only lasts for an instant."
"Aussitôt qu'une pensée vraie est entrée dans notre esprit, elle jette une lumière qui nous fait voir une foule d'autres objets que nous n'apercevions pas auparavant."
"Every institution goes through three stages — utility, privilege, and abuse."
"J'ai pleuré et j'ai cru."
"L’écrivain original n’est pas celui qui n’imite personne, mais celui que personne ne peut imiter."
"Though we have not employed the arguments usually advanced by the apologists of Christianity, we have arrived by a different chain of reasoning at the same conclusion: Christianity is perfect; men are imperfect. Now, a perfect consequence cannot spring from an imperfect principle. Christianity, therefore, is not the work of men. If Christianity is not the work of man, it can have come from none but God. If it came from God, men cannot have acquired a knowledge of it except by revelation. Therefore, Christianity is a revealed religion."
"I have explored the seas of the Old World and the New, and trodden the soil of the four quarters of the Earth. Having camped in the cabins of Iroquois, and beneath the tents of Arabs, in the wigwams of Hurons, in the remains of Athens, Jerusalem, Memphis, Carthage, Granada, among Greeks, Turks and Moors, among forests and ruins; after wearing the bearskin cloak of the savage, and the silk caftan of the Mameluke, after suffering poverty, hunger, thirst, and exile, I have sat, a minister and ambassador, covered with gold lace, gaudy with ribbons and decorations, at the table of kings, the feasts of princes and princesses, only to fall once more into indigence and know imprisonment."
"I have borne the musket of a soldier, the traveller’s cane, and the pilgrim’s staff: as a sailor my fate has been as inconstant as the wind: a kingfisher, I have made my nest among the waves. I have been party to peace and war: I have signed treaties, protocols, and along the way published numerous works. I have been made privy to party secrets, of court and state: I have viewed closely the rarest disasters, the greatest good fortune, the highest reputations. I have been present at sieges, congresses, conclaves, at the restoration and demolition of thrones. I have made history, and been able to write it. ... Within and alongside my age, perhaps without wishing or seeking to, I have exerted upon it a triple influence, religious, political and literary."
"Memory is often the attribute of stupidity; it generally belongs to heavy spirits whom it makes even heavier by the baggage it loads them down with."
"It is a long way from Combourg to Berlin, from a youthful dreamer to an old minister. I find among the words preceding these: ‘In how many places have I already continued writing these Memoirs, and in what place will I finish them?'"
"Aristocracy has three successive ages, — the age of superiorities, the age of privileges, and the age of vanities; having passed out of the first, it degenerates in the second, and dies away in the third."
"I halt at the beginning of my travels, in Pennsylvania, in order to compare Washington and Bonaparte. I would rather not have concerned myself with them until the point where I had met Napoleon; but if I came to the edge of my grave without having reached the year 1814 in my tale, no one would then know anything of what I would have written concerning these two representatives of Providence. I remember Castelnau: like me Ambassador to England, who wrote like me a narrative of his life in London. On the last page of Book VII, he says to his son: ‘I will deal with this event in Book VIII,’ and Book VIII of Castelnau’s Memoirs does not exist: that warns me to take advantage of being alive."
"A degree of silence envelops Washington’s actions; he moved slowly; one might say that he felt charged with future liberty, and that he feared to compromise it. It was not his own destiny that inspired this new species of hero: it was that of his country; he did not allow himself to enjoy what did not belong to him; but from that profound humility what glory emerged! Search the woods where Washington’s sword gleamed: what do you find? Tombs? No; a world! Washington has left the United States behind for a monument on the field of battle. Bonaparte shared no trait with that serious American: he fought amidst thunder in an old world; he thought about nothing but creating his own fame; he was inspired only by his own fate. He seemed to know that his project would be short, that the torrent which falls from such heights flows swiftly; he hastened to enjoy and abuse his glory, like fleeting youth. Following the example of Homer’s gods, in four paces he reached the ends of the world. He appeared on every shore; he wrote his name hurriedly in the annals of every people; he threw royal crowns to his family and his generals; he hurried through his monuments, his laws, his victories. Leaning over the world, with one hand he deposed kings, with the other he pulled down the giant, Revolution; but, in eliminating anarchy, he stifled liberty, and ended by losing his own on his last field of battle. Each was rewarded according to his efforts: Washington brings a nation to independence; a justice at peace, he falls asleep beneath his own roof in the midst of his compatriots’ grief and the veneration of nations. Bonaparte robs a nation of its independence: deposed as emperor, he is sent into exile, where the world’s anxiety still does not think him safely enough imprisoned, guarded by the Ocean. He dies: the news proclaimed on the door of the palace in front of which the conqueror had announced so many funerals, neither detains nor astonishes the passer-by: what have the citizens to mourn? Washington’s Republic lives on; Bonaparte’s empire is destroyed. Washington and Bonaparte emerged from the womb of democracy: both of them born to liberty, the former remained faithful to her, the latter betrayed her. Washington acted as the representative of the needs, the ideas, the enlightened men, the opinions of his age; he supported, not thwarted, the stirrings of intellect; he desired only what he had to desire, the very thing to which he had been called: from which derives the coherence and longevity of his work. That man who struck few blows because he kept things in proportion has merged his existence with that of his country: his glory is the heritage of civilisation; his fame has risen like one of those public sanctuaries where a fecund and inexhaustible spring flows."
"One does not learn how to die by killing others."
"My downfall made a great noise: those who appeared most satisfied criticized the manner of it."
"How small man is on this little atom where he dies! But how great his intelligence! He knows when the face of the stars must be masked in darkness, when the comets will return after thousands of years, he who lasts only an instant! A microscopic insect lost in a fold of the heavenly robe, the orbs cannot hide from him a single one of their movements in the depth of space. What destinies will those stars, new to us, light? Is their revelation bound up with some new phase of humanity? You will know, race to be born; I know not, and I am departing."
"New storms will arise; one can believe in calamities to come which will surpass the afflictions we have been overwhelmed by in the past; already, men are thinking of bandaging their old wounds to return to the battlefield. However, I do not expect an imminent outbreak of war: nations and kings are equally weary; unforeseen catastrophe will not yet fall on France: what follows me will only be the effect of general transformation. No doubt there will be painful moments: the face of the world cannot change without suffering. But, once again, there will be no separate revolutions; simply the great revolution approaching its end. The scenes of tomorrow no longer concern me; they call for other artists: your turn, gentlemen! As I write these last words, my window, which looks west over the gardens of the Foreign Mission, is open: it is six in the morning; I can see the pale and swollen moon; it is sinking over the spire of the Invalides, scarcely touched by the first golden glow from the East; one might say that the old world was ending, and the new beginning. I behold the light of a dawn whose sunrise I shall never see. It only remains for me to sit down at the edge of my grave; then I shall descend boldly, crucifix in hand, into eternity."
"A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both."
"He has abundant views on the future, particularly on the subject of religion and the social rôle which he believed it called upon to play. His influence on literature is unanimously acknowledged. Romanticism may be traced back to him, and it may even be said that the whole literary movement characteristic of the nineteenth century begins with him."
"In the twenty-sixth book of his Mémoires d'outre-tombe, Chateaubriand recounts his 1821 arrival at the French embassy in Berlin. He cites a flattering portrait of him written by the Baroness of Hohenhausen and published in the morning press on March 22: "M. de Chateaubriand is of a somewhat short, yet slender, stature. His oval face has an expression of reverence and melancholy. He has black hair and black eyes that glow with the fire of his mind." At this point, Chateaubriand flatly adds: "Mais j'ai les cheveux blancs; j'ai plus d'un siècle, en outre, je suis mort" ("But I have white hair; I am more than a century old, besides, I am dead") ... Of course, those startling words, "en outre, je suis mort" do not refer to the year 1821, nor to the time Chateaubriand is writing this account. Rather, they refer to the time we, readers, turn to this specific page of the Mémoires: as you are reading this, Chateaubriand reminds us, I am dead. The words wrest us away from the event he is relating, his arrival in Berlin, to remind us in the most direct terms that our reading of these words necessarily entails the death of their author. Moreover, the French en outre brings us back to the very title of the Mémoires d'outre-tombe: outre-tombe, from beyond the grave. In 1836, Chateaubriand signed a contract with a society of shareholders: in exchange for an immediate payment of 156,000 francs and a life annuity, he sold "the literary ownership of his Mémoires as they existed and as they would exist at his death." Commenting on this transaction, Maurice Levaillant notes: "With this agreement, Chateaubriand bought material security at the price of a concession that he never got over: instead of appearing after a period he had first prescribed as fifty years after his death, his Mémoires would suddenly appear, so to speak, live from his grave.""
"I will be Chateaubriand or nothing."
"Though sincerity and confidence have many points of resemblance, they have yet many points of difference. Sincerity is an openness of heart, which shows us what we are, a love of truth, a dislike to deception, a wish to compensate our faults and to lessen them by the merit of confessing them."
"Confidence always pleases those who receive it. It is a tribute we pay to their merit, a deposit we commit to their trust, a pledge which gives them a claim upon us, a kind of dependence to which we voluntarily submit. I do not wish from what I have said to depreciate confidence, so necessary to man."
"We should make it a rule never to have half confidences. They always embarrass those who give them, and dissatisfy those who receive them. They shed an uncertain light on what we want hidden, increase curiosity, entitling the recipients to know more, giving them leave to consider themselves free to talk of what they have guessed. It is far safer and more honest to tell nothing than to be silent when we have begun to tell."
"Although all the qualities of mind may be united in a great genius, yet there are some which are special and peculiar to him; his views are unlimited; he always acts uniformly and with the same activity; he sees distant objects as if present; he comprehends and grasps the greatest, sees and notices the smallest matters; his thoughts are elevated, broad, just and intelligible. Nothing escapes his observation, and he often finds truth in spite of the obscurity that hides her from others. A lofty mind always thinks nobly, it easily creates vivid, agreeable, and natural fancies, places them in their best light, clothes them with all appropriate adornments, studies others' tastes, and clears away from its own thoughts all that is useless and disagreeable."
"Satire is at once the most agreeable and most dangerous of mental qualities. It always pleases when it is refined, but we always fear those who use it too much, yet satire should be allowed when unmixed with spite, and when the person satirised can join in the satire. It is unfortunate to have a satirical turn without affecting to be pleased or without loving to jest."
"Raillery is a kind of mirth which takes possession of the imagination, and shows every object in an absurd light; wit combines more or less softness or harshness."
"There is a difference between an ardent and a brilliant mind, a fiery spirit travels further and faster, while a brilliant mind is sparkling, attractive, accurate."
"Though the gifts of the mind are infinite, they can, it seems to me, be thus classified. There are some so beautiful that everyone can see and feel their beauty. There are some lovely, it is true, but which are wearisome. There are some which are lovely, which all the world admire, but without knowing why. There are some so refined and delicate that few are capable even of remarking all their beauties. There are others which, though imperfect, yet are produced with such skill, and sustained and managed with such sense and grace, that they even deserve to be admired."
"The word taste has different meanings, which it is easy to mistake. There is a difference between the taste which in certain objects has an attraction for us, and the taste that makes us understand and distinguish the qualities we judge by."
"Some have a species of instinct (the source of which they are ignorant of), and decide all questions that come before them by its aid, and always decide rightly. These follow their taste more than their intelligence, because they do not permit their temper and self-love to prevail over their natural discernment. All they do is in harmony, all is in the same spirit. This harmony makes them decide correctly on matters, and form a correct estimate of their value. But speaking generally there are few who have a taste fixed and independent of that of their friends, they follow example and fashion which generally form the standard of taste."
"The reason why so few persons are agreeable in conversation is that each thinks more of what he desires to say, than of what the others say, and that we make bad listeners when we want to speak. Yet it is necessary to listen to those who talk, we should give them the time they want, and let them say even senseless things; never contradict or interrupt them; on the contrary, we should enter into their mind and taste, illustrate their meaning, praise anything they say that deserves praise, and let them see we praise more from our choice than from agreement with them. To please others we should talk on subjects they like and that interest them, avoid disputes upon indifferent matters, seldom ask questions, and never let them see that we pretend to be better informed than they are."
"We should never say anything with an air of authority, nor show any superiority of mind. We should avoid far-fetched expressions, expressions hard or forced, and never let the words be grander than the matter."
"We are sure to displease when we speak too long and too often of one subject, and when we try to turn the conversation upon subjects that we think more instructive than others, we should enter indifferently upon every subject that is agreeable to others, stopping where they wish, and avoiding all they do not agree with."
"We should observe the place, the occasion, the temper in which we find the person who listens to us, for if there is much art in speaking to the purpose, there is no less in knowing when to be silent. There is an eloquent silence which serves to approve or to condemn, there is a silence of discretion and of respect. In a word, there is a tone, an air, a manner, which renders everything in conversation agreeable or disagreeable, refined or vulgar."
"There is an air which belongs to the figure and talents of each individual; we always lose it when we abandon it to assume another. We should try to find out what air is natural to us and never abandon it, but make it as perfect as we can. This is the reason that the majority of children please. It is because they are wrapt up in the air and manner nature has given them, and are ignorant of any other. They are changed and corrupted when they quit infancy, they think they should imitate what they see, and they are not altogether able to imitate it. In this imitation there is always something of falsity and uncertainty. They have nothing settled in their manner and opinions. Instead of being in reality what they want to appear, they seek to appear what they are not."
"All men want to be different, and to be greater than they are; they seek for an air other than their own, and a mind different from what they possess; they take their style and manner at chance. They make experiments upon themselves without considering that what suits one person will not suit everyone, that there is no universal rule for taste or manners, and that there are no good copies."
"Few men, nevertheless, can have unison in many matters without being a copy of each other, if each follow his natural turn of mind. But in general a person will not wholly follow it. He loves to imitate. We often imitate the same person without perceiving it, and we neglect our own good qualities for the good qualities of others, which generally do not suit us."
"But, yet acquired qualities should always have a certain agreement and a certain union with our own natural qualities, which they imperceptibly extend and increase."
"We should not speak of all subjects in one tone and in the same manner. We do not march at the head of a regiment as we walk on a promenade; and we should use the same style in which we should naturally speak of different things in the same way, with the same difference as we should walk, but always naturally, and as is suitable, either at the head of a regiment or on a promenade.="
"Thousands of people with good qualities are displeasing; thousands pleasing with far less abilities, and why? Because the first wish to appear to be what they are not, the second are what they appear. Some of the advantages or disadvantages that we have received from nature please in proportion as we know the air, the style, the manner, the sentiments that coincide with our condition and our appearance, and displease in the proportion they are removed from that point."
"Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que de vices déguisés."
"Ce que nous prenons pour des vertus n'est souvent qu'un assemblage de diverses actions et de divers intérêts, que la fortune ou notre industrie savent arranger; et ce n'est pas toujours par valeur et par chasteté que les hommes sont vaillants, et que les femmes sont chastes."
"L'amour-propre est le plus grand de tous les flatteurs."
"La passion fait souvent un fou du plus habile homme, et rend souvent les plus sots habiles."
"Les passions sont les seuls orateurs qui persuadent toujours. Elles sont comme un art de la nature dont les règles sont infaillibles; et l'homme le plus simple qui a de la passion persuade mieux que le plus éloquent qui n'en a point."
"Il y a dans le coeur humain une génération perpétuelle de passions, en sorte que la ruine de l'une est presque toujours l'établissement d'une autre."
"Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d'autrui."
"La philosophie triomphe aisément des maux passés et des maux à venir. Mais les maux présents triomphent d'elle."
"Il faut de plus grandes vertus pour soutenir la bonne fortune que la mauvaise."
"Le soleil ni la mort ne se peuvent regarder fixement."
"Le mal que nous faisons ne nous attire pas tant de persécution et de haine que nos bonnes qualités."
"Si nous n'avions point de défauts, nous ne prendrions pas tant de plaisir à en remarquer dans les autres."
"La jalousie se nourrit dans les doutes, et elle devient fureur, ou elle finit, sitôt qu'on passe du doute à la certitude."
"Nous promettons selon nos espérances, et nous tenons selon nos craintes."
"L'intérêt parle toutes sortes de langues, et joue toutes sortes de personnages, même celui de désintéressé."
"Ceux qui s'appliquent trop aux petites choses deviennent ordinairement incapables des grandes."
"L'homme croit souvent se conduire lorsqu'il est conduit; et pendant que par son esprit il tend à un but, son coeur l'entraîne insensiblement à un autre."
"On n'est jamais si heureux ni si malheureux qu'on s'imagine."
"Pour s'établir dans le monde, on fait tout ce que l'on peut pour y paraître établi."
"Le bonheur et le malheur des hommes ne dépend pas moins de leur humeur que de la fortune."
"La sincérité est une ouverture de coeur. On la trouve en fort peu de gens; et celle que l'on voit d'ordinaire n'est qu'une fine dissimulation pour attirer la confiance des autres."
"La bonne grâce est au corps ce que le bon sens est à l'esprit."
"Il est difficile de définir l'amour. Dans l'âme c'est une passion de régner, dans les esprits c'est une sympathie, et dans le corps ce n'est qu'une envie cachée et délicate de posséder ce que l'on aime après beaucoup de mystères."
"Il n’y a point de déguisement qui puisse longtemps cacher l’amour où il est, ni le feindre où il n’est pas."
"Il n'y a guère de gens qui ne soient honteux de s'être aimés, quand ils ne s'aiment plus."
"Si on juge de l'amour par la plupart de ses effets, il ressemble plus à la haine qu'à l'amitié."
"On peut trouver des femmes qui n'ont jamais eu de galanterie; mais il est rare d'en trouver qui n'en aient jamais eu qu'une."
"Il n'y a qu'une sorte d'amour, mais il y en a mille différentes copies."
"L'amour aussi bien que le feu ne peut subsister sans un mouvement continuel; et il cesse de vivre dès qu'il cesse d'espérer ou de craindre."
"Il est du véritable amour comme de l'apparition des esprits: tout le monde en parle, mais peu de gens en ont vu."
"L'amour de la justice n'est en la plupart des hommes que la crainte de souffrir l'injustice."
"Le silence est le parti le plus sûr de celui qui se défie de soi-même."
"Ce que les hommes ont nommé amitié n'est qu'une société, qu'un ménagement réciproque d'intérêts, et qu'un échange de bons offices; ce n'est enfin qu'un commerce où l'amour-propre se propose toujours quelque chose à gagner."
"Il est plus honteux de se défier de ses amis que d'en être trompé."
"Tout le monde se plaint de sa mémoire, et personne ne se plaint de son jugement."
"Les vieillards aiment à donner de bons préceptes, pour se consoler de n'être plus en état de donner de mauvais exemples."
"Tel homme est ingrat, qui est moins coupable de son ingratitude que celui qui lui a fait du bien."
"Chacun dit du bien de son coeur et personne n'en ose dire de son esprit."
"Dans l'adversité de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous déplaît pas."
"L'esprit est toujours la dupe du coeur."
"Tous ceux qui connaissent leur esprit ne connaissent pas leur coeur."
"On ne donne rien si libéralement que ses conseils."
"Il y a de bons mariages, mais il n'y en a point de délicieux."
"L'intention de ne jamais tromper nous expose à être souvent trompés."
"Nous sommes si accoutumés à nous déguiser aux autres qu’enfin nous nous déguisons à nous-mêmes."
"Si nous résistons à nos passions, c'est plus par leur faiblesse que par notre force."
"Le vrai moyen d'être trompé, c'est de se croire plus fin que les autres."
"Il suffit quelquefois d'être grossier pour n'être pas trompé par un habile homme."
"Il est plus aisé d'être sage pour les autres que de l'être pour soi-même."
"Il y a des gens qui n'auraient jamais été amoureux s'ils n'avaint jamais entendu parler de l'amour."
"On parle peu quand la vanité ne fait pas parler."
"On aime mieux dire du mal de soi-même que de n'en point parler."
"Comme c’est le caractère des grands esprits de faire entendre en peu de paroles beaucoup de choses, les petits esprits au contraire ont le don de beaucoup parler, et de ne rien dire."
"On ne loue d'ordinaire que pour être loué."
"Il y a des reproches qui louent et des louanges qui médisent."
"Le refus des louanges est un désir d'être loué deux fois."
"Il est plus difficile de s’empêcher d’être gouverné que de gouverner les autres."
"Ce n'est pas assez d'avoir de grandes qualités, il en faut avoir l'économie."
"The art of using moderate abilities to advantage wins praise, and often acquires more reputation than actual brilliancy."
"Il est plus facile de paraître digne des emplois qu'on n'a pas que de ceux que l'on exerce."
"Il vaut mieux employer notre esprit à supporter les infortunes qui nous arrivent qu'à prévoir celles qui nous peuvent arriver."
"Notre repentir n'est pas tant un regret du mal que nous avons fait, qu'une crainte de celui qui nous en peut arriver."
"Il n'appartient qu'aux grands hommes d'avoir de grands défauts."
"Les défauts de l'âme sont comme les blessures du corps: quelque soin qu'on prenne de les guérir, la cicatrice paraît toujours, et elles sont à tout moment en danger de se rouvrir."
"Ce qui nous empêche souvent de nous abandonner à un seul vice est que nous en avons plusieurs."
"Le désir de paraître habile empêche souvent de le devenir."
"Il y a des gens niais qui se connaissent et qui emploient habilement leur niaiserie."
"Qui vit sans folie n'est pas si sage qu'il croit."
"En vieillissant on devient plus fou et plus sage."
"La plupart des gens ne jugent des hommes que par la vogue qu'ils ont, ou par leur fortune."
"L'hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu."
"Le trop grand empressement qu'on a de s'acquitter d'une obligation est une espèce d'ingratitude."
"Les gens heureux ne se corrigent guère; ils croient toujours avoir raison quand la fortune soutient leur mauvaise conduite."
"C'est une grande folie de vouloir être sage tout seul."
"Nul ne mérite d’être loué de bonté, s’il n’a pas la force d’être méchant: toute autre bonté n’est le plus souvent qu’une paresse ou une impuissance de la volonté."
"Il n'est pas si dangereux de faire du mal à la plupart des hommes que de leur faire trop de bien."
"C'est une grande habileté que de savoir cacher son habileté."
"La véritable éloquence consiste à dire tout ce qu’il faut, et à ne dire que ce qu’il faut."
"Il y a des personnes à qui les défauts siéent bien, et d'autres qui sont disgraciées avec leurs bonnes qualités."
"Dans toutes les professions chacun affecte une mine et un extérieur pour paraître ce qu'il veut qu'on le croie. Ainsi on peut dire que le monde n'est composé que de mines."
"Le plaisir de l'amour est d'aimer; et l'on est plus heureux par la passion que l'on a que par celle que l'on donne."
"Il n'y a guère d'homme assez habile pour connaître tout le mal qu'il fait."
"L'absence diminue les médiocres passions, et augmente les grandes, comme le vent éteint les bougies et allume le feu."
"Il est impossible d'aimer une seconde fois ce qu'on a véritablement cessé d'aimer."
"Nous aimons toujours ceux qui nous admirent; et nous n'aimons pas toujours ceux que nous admirons."
"La reconnaissance de la plupart des hommes n'est qu'une secrète envie de recevoir de plus grands bienfaits."
"Nous pardonnons souvent à ceux qui nous ennuient, mais nous ne pouvons pardonner à ceux que nous ennuyons."
"On a fait une vertu de la modération pour borner l’ambition des grands hommes, et pour consoler les gens médiocres de leur peu de fortune, et de leur peu de mérite."
"Il arrive quelquefois des accidents dans la vie d'où il faut être un peu fou pour se bien tirer."
"Ce qui fait que les amants et les maîtresses ne s'ennuient point d'être ensemble, c'est qu'ils parlent toujours d'eux-mêmes."
"L’extrême plaisir que nous prenons à parler de nous-mêmes nous doit faire craindre de n’en donner guere à ceux qui nous écoutent."
"Ce n'est pas un grand malheur d'obliger des ingrats, mais c'en est un insupportable d'être obligé à un malhonnête homme."
"Il y a dans la jalousie plus d'amour-propre que d'amour."
"Nous n'avouons de petits défauts que pour persuader que nous n'en avons pas de grands."
"On pardonne tant que l'on aime."
"Nous ne trouvons guère de gens de bon sens, que ceux qui sont de notre avis."
"Ce qui nous donne tant d’aigreur contre ceux qui nous font des finesses, c’est qu’ils croient être plus habiles que nous."
"La jalousie naît toujours avec l'amour, mais elle ne meurt pas toujours avec lui."
"Il y a peu d'honnêtes femmes qui ne soient lasses de leur métier."
"Les esprits médiocres condamnent d'ordinaire tout ce qui passe leur portée."
"Le plus grand défaut de la pénétration n'est pas de n'aller point jusqu'au but, c'est de le passer."
"On donne des conseils mais on n'inspire point de conduite."
"Il n'y a point de gens qui aient plus souvent tort que ceux qui ne peuvent souffrir d'en avoir."
"Ce qui nous rend la vanité des autres insupportable, c'est qu'elle blesse la nôtre."
"Il faut gouverner la fortune comme la santé: en jouir quand elle est bonne, prendre patience quand elle est mauvaise."
"Il y a une élévation qui ne dépend point de la fortune: c’est un certain air qui nous distingue et qui semble nous destiner aux grandes choses; c’est un prix que nous nous donnons imperceptiblement à nous-mêmes; c’est par cette qualité que nous usurpons les déférences des autres hommes, et c’est elle d’ordinaire qui nous met plus au-dessus d’eux que la naissance, les dignités, et le mérite même."
"Il y a du mérite sans élévation, mais il n'y a point d'élévation sans quelque mérite."
"Nous aurions souvent honte de nos plus belles actions, si le monde voyoit tous les motifs qui les produisent."
"La vivacité qui augmente en vieillissant ne va pas loin de la folie."
"En amour, celui qui est guéri le premier est toujours le mieux guéri."
"Peu de gens savent être vieux."
"Rien n'empêche tant d'être naturel que l'envie de le paraître."
"Il est plus aisé de connaître l'homme en général que de connaître un homme en particulier."
"Dans l'amitié comme dans l'amour on est souvent plus heureux par les choses qu'on ignore que par celles que l'on sait."
"Nous essayons de nous faire honneur des défauts que nous ne voulons pas corriger."
"Il s'en faut bien que l'innocence ne trouve autant de protection que le crime."
"De toutes les passions violentes, celle qui sied le moins mal aux femmes, c'est l'amour."
"Dans les premières passions les femmes aiment l'amant, et dans les autres elles aiment l'amour."
"Il y a peu de femmes dont le mérite dure plus que la beauté."
"Il n'y a que les personnes qui ont de la fermeté qui puissent avoir une véritable douceur."
"Ceux qui ont eu de grandes passions se trouvent toute leur vie heureux, et malheureux, d'en être guéris."
"Les querelles ne dureraient pas longtemps, si le tort n'était que d'un côté."
"Il ne sert à rien d'être jeune sans être belle, ni d'être belle sans être jeune."
"C’est une espèce de bonheur, de connaître jusqu’à quel point on doit être malheureux."
"Comment prétendons-nous qu'un autre puisse garder notre secret, si nous ne pouvons le garder nous-mêmes?"
"C'est une ennuyeuse maladie que de conserver sa santé par un trop grand régime."
"Il ne faut pas s’offenser que les autres nous cachent la vérité puisque nous nous la cachons si souvent à nous-mêmes."
"Ce qui nous fait croire si facilement que les autres ont des défauts, c'est la facilité que l'on a de croire ce qu'on souhaite."
"Il est quelquefois agréable à un mari d'avoir une femme jalouse; il entend toujours parler de ce qu'il aime."
"Il est plus difficile de dissimuler les sentiments que l'on a que de feindre ceux que l'on n'a pas."
"Les petits esprits sont blessés des plus petites choses"
"Ce qui fait que si peu de personnes sont agréables dans la conversation, c'est que chacun songe plus à ce qu'il veut dire qu'à ce que les autres disent."
"Il faut écouter ceux qui parlent, si on veut en être écouté."
"La pompe des enterrements regarde plus la vanité des vivants que l'honneur des morts."
"This is no time to be getting all steamed up about La Rochefoucauld. It's only a question of minutes before I'm going to be pretty darned good and sick of La Rochefoucauld, once and for all. La Rochefoucauld this and La Rochefoucauld that. Yes, well, let me tell you that if nobody had ever learned to quote, very few people would be in love with La Rochefoucauld. I bet you I don't know ten souls who read him without a middleman."
"As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew From Nature, I believe 'em true: They argue no corrupted mind In him; the fault is in mankind."
"When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes."
"There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall."
"Nothing ages a woman like living in the country."
"Life as a child and then as a girl had taught her patience, hope, silence; and given her a prisoner's proficiency in handling these virtues as weapons."
"Let’s go out and buy playing-cards, good wine, bridge-scorers, knitting needles—all the paraphernalia to fill a gaping void, all that’s required to disguise that monster, an old woman."
"It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place."
"Le monde des èmotions qu’on nomme, á la lègére, physiques."
"I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer."
"If one wished to be perfectly sincere, one would have to admit there are two kinds of love—well-fed and ill-fed. The rest is pure fiction."
"My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved."
"Can it be that chance has made me one of those women so immersed in one man that, whether they are barren or not, they carry with them to the grave the shrivelled innocence of an old maid?"
"We only do well the things we like doing."
"By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet."
"You do not notice changes in what is always before you."
"But just as delicate fare does not stop you from craving for saveloys, so tried and exquisite friendship does not take away your taste for something new and dubious."
"The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time."
"To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one."
"The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before."
"Total absence of humor renders life impossible."
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm."
"The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen."
"Humility has its origin in an awareness of unworthiness, and sometimes too in a dazzled awareness of saintliness."
"You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly."
"There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment, for in another moment they will recover their illusion."
"What a delight it is to make friends with someone you have despised!"
"It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change."
"As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow."
"It’s nothing to be born ugly. Sensibly, the ugly woman comes to terms with her ugliness and exploits it as a grace of nature. To become ugly means the beginning of a calamity, self-willed most of the time."
"For to dream and then to return to reality only means that our qualms suffer a change of place and significance."
"It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship."
"Whether you are dealing with an animal or a child, to convince is to weaken."
"Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: “It’s four o’clock … At five I have my abyss.”"
"Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave."
"Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette."
"In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness."
"On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us — ah! what a dream, to live in that! — the other stifles us at the first breath."
"Don’t ever wear artistic jewellry; it wrecks a woman’s reputation."
"Boredom helps one to make decisions."
"A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men... nine men out of ten are superstitious, nineteen out of twenty believe in the evil eye, and ninety-eight out of a hundred are afraid of spiders. They forgive us — oh! for many things, but not for the absence in us of their own feelings."
"Toby-Dog: It seems to me that of the two of us it's you they make the most of, and yet you do all the grumbling. Kiki-The-Demure: A dog's logic, that! The more one gives the more I demand. Toby-Dog: That's wrong. It's indiscreet. Kiki-The-Demure: Not at all. I have a right to everything. Toby-Dog: To everything? And I? Kiki-The-Demure: I don't imagine you lack anything, do you? Toby-Dog: Ah, I don't know. Sometimes in my very happiest moments, I feel like crying. My eyes grow dim, my heart seems to choke me. I would like to be sure, in such times of anguish, that everybody loves me; that there is nowhere in the world a sad dog behind a closed door, that no evil will ever come... Kiki-The-Demure: And then what dreadful thing happens? Toby-Dog: You know very well! Inevitably, at that moment She appears, carrying a bottle with horrible yellow stuff floating in it — Castor Oil!"
"Kiki-The-Demure: Once when I was little She tried to give me castor oil. I scratched and bit her so, she never tried again. Ha! She must have thought she held the devil between her knees. I squirmed, blew fire through my nostrils, multiplied my twenty claws by a hundred, my teeth by one thousand, and finally — disappeared as if by magic. Toby-Dog: I wouldn't dare do that. You see, I love her. I love her enough to forgive her even the torture of the bath."
"If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles,"
"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."
"I am devoted to those who endured, like Colette. It is easier … to kiss the world a bitter goodbye than to go on working, writing, changing, enduring the slings & arrows of outrageous aging. Colette endured. And she wrote & wrote & wrote. Whenever I feel really depressed, I think of her & keep going."
"Here lived, here died Colette, whose work is a window wide open on life."
"I've felt that her perceptions, her feelings about food, gardens, the sea are beautiful. She was a peasant-that was her saving grace. And yet so elegant in her style. But I love the peasant in her, the one who delights in smells and tastes. I never tasted a of chocolate like her chocolate. And her matchless subtlety. Do remember the episode, I think it's so funny, when they were going to bring her into the Académie Française and they said, oh yes, she's a beautiful writer, a wonderful stylist, but she doesn't write about important things, only about love? She's only writing about love. She meant a lot to me."
"I do admire Colette, her wonderful descriptions of flowers, trees and animals, animals especially."
"One of the most frequently quoted literary passages on lesbian relationship is that in which Colette's Renée, in The Vagabond, describes "the melancholy and touching image of two weak creatures who have perhaps found shelter in each other's arms, there to sleep and weep, safe from man who is often cruel, and there to taste better than any pleasure, the bitter happiness of feeling themselves akin, frail and forgotten [emphasis added]." Colette is often considered a lesbian writer. Her popular reputation has, I think, much to do with the fact that she writes about lesbian existence as if for a male audience; her earliest "lesbian" novels, the Claudine series, were written under compulsion for her husband and published under both their names. At all events, except for her writings on her mother, Colette is a less reliable source on the lesbian continuum than, I would think, Charlotte Brontë, who understood that while women may, indeed must, be one another's allies, mentors, and comforters in the female struggle for survival, there is quite extraneous delight in each other's company and attraction to each others' minds and character, which attend a recognition of each others' strengths."
"For brevity, for wit that began back in the observation of the eye which produced it; for the loving openness, almost transparency, of all the senses to the moment passing, its time and place; for a recognition of the essence of that tension (of whatever name or quality) existing between and among the human beings and sometimes the cat in a room together; for a recording of feeling as strict as a seismograph's; perhaps best of all for a real gaiety, a real laughing gaiety-for these things we will value, honor, study, and above all delight in Colette."
"J'ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d'écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible."
"Ce n'est pas la première fois que je remarque combien, en France particulièrement, les mots ont plus d’empire que les idées."
"La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie."
"Nous ne pouvons arracher une seule page de notre vie, mais nous pouvons jeter le livre au feu."
"Mais, fat impudent, tu ne veux pas qu'on te pardonne, tu veux qu'on croie ou qu'on prétende n'avoir rien à te pardonner. Tu veux qu'on baise la main qui frappe et la bouche qui ment."
"Thank God that one ridiculing is not enough for ambitious youth, which expands and refines itself by means of a thousand errors and mistakes, owing to the powerful engine of self-love. My friend, we often spoke of those among our contemporaries in whom we saw personality developing in frightening excess; we saw them do much evil while desiring to do good. Sometimes we made fun of them, often on several occasions; more often we pitied them. But we always loved them, nevertheless!"
"...exploiters are sometimes duped by their own egotism...the devoted don't always lack happiness. I proved nothing; one proves nothing with stories, not even true ones; but good people have consciences that bolster them, and it's for them above all that I wrote this book, in which so much malice has been perceived. They do me too much honor: I would much rather belong to the poorer class of suckers than the more illustrious one of the jokers. "Notice" (1852) in Horace, translated from French to English by Zack Rogow (1995)"
"La vie est une longue blessure qui s'endort rarement et ne se guérit jamais."
"L'art est une démonstration dont la nature est la preuve."
"L'art pour l'art est un vain mot. L'art pour le vrai, l'art pour le beau et le bon, voilà la religion que je cherche...."
"Les chefs-d'oeuvre ne sont jamais que des tentatives heureuses."
"L'art n'est pas une étude de la réalité positive; c'est une recherche de la vérité idéale."
"Je vois sur leurs nobles fronts le sceau du Seigneur, car ils sont nés rois de la terre bien mieux que ceux qui la possèdent pour l'avoir payée."
"Tous, quand nous avons un peu de loisir et d'argent, nous voyageons, ou plutôt nous fuyons, car il ne s'agit pas tant de voyager que de partir, entendez-vous? Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas quelque douleur à distraire ou quelque joug à secouer?"
"Dans les jours orageux de la jeunesse, on s'imagine que la solitude est le grand refuge contre les atteintes, le grand remède aux blessures du combat; c'est une grave erreur, et l'expérience de la vie nous apprend que, là ou l'on ne peut vivre en paix avec ses semblables, il n'est point d'admiration poétique ni de jouissances d'art capables de combler l'abîme qui se creuse au fond de l'âme."
"The author of these novellas has never had a system as to the priority of one sex over the other. He has always believed in the perfect natural equality between the sexes which is in no way altered by the diversity of their functions, since each sex finds its superiority in exercising the function that nature and Providence have accorded it."
"one should always judge youth leniently. Certainly it would be unfair to pass dogmatic judgment upon what is spontaneous and consequently naïve."
"On est heureux par soi-même quand on sait s'y prendre, avoir des goûts simples, un certain courage, une certaine abnégation, l'amour du travail et avant tout une bonne conscience."
"Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué."
"Apprendre à voir, voilà tout le secret des études naturelles."
"La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n’est que le prestige d’un moment; l’œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme."
"What is it that you think about, Sleeping Beauty, as you ride along the country lanes on that skinny mare of yours? And not so much of a beauty either, come to think of it. Too skinny, too pale, too dull. Not a glimmer of sparkle in those big dark eyes. Still, I do wonder, when you're riding past the hedges, little dreaming you are watched, I wonder what exactly it is you go out for. What sort of things are going through your mind? You look straight ahead, far into the distance and I wonder, do your thoughts travel that far too, or do they stay close to home, wrapped up in yourself?"
"Here I am, worried and anxious; there she is, serenity incarnate. How can she appear before me like a human reproach? Like an ironic comment on my own life. How can she never suspect I might be miserable? Unlike myself, she is not protected by a mature, philosophical outlook on existence. Compared to me she is a child. No struggle has tested her strength, no disappointment has yet caused her spirit to waver. But that's it, by God! That's the very reason she is the stronger. She has lost nothing of herself. She has not been devoured by vultures and wolves! She is untouched. She lives life to the full. However feeble the flame within her it is enough to light her way. But as for me, the fire in my heart burns me alive."
"Je n'appelle pas priere un choix et un arrangement de paroles lancees vers le ciel, mais un entretien de la pensee avec l'ideal de lumiere et de perfections infinies."
"It was there he composed these most beautiful of short pages which he modestly entitled the Preludes. They are masterpieces. Several bring to mind visions of deceased monks and the sound of funeral chants; others are melancholy and fragrant; they came to him in times of sun and health, in the clamor of laughing children under he window, the faraway sound of guitars, birdsongs from the moist leaves, in the sight of the small pale roses coming in bloom on the snow. … Still others are of a mournful sadness, and while charming your ear, they break your heart. There is one that came to him through an evening of dismal rain — it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left him in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at out "encampment." The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful Prelude. Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, "Ah, I was sure that you were dead." When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguished the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy while playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should intepret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might — and he was right to — against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky. … The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power."
"His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. It came to his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he would hasten to hear it again by, tossing it off on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labor I have ever witnessed. It was a series of efforts, indecision, and impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he had heard: what had come to him all of a piece, he now over-analyzed in his desire to write it down, and his regret at not finding it again "neat," as he said, would throw him into a kind of despair. He would shut himself up in his room for days at a time, weeping, pacing, breaking his pens, repeating and changing a single measure a hundred times, writing it and effacing it with equal frequency, and beginning again the next day with a meticulous and desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on one page, only to end up writing it just as he had traced it in his first outpouring."
"Three years ago in Saint-Front, an ugly little town that you won't find on any map, something happened that caused quite a stir. It wasn't particularly interesting and few people heard of it, but it had serious consequences. (first lines)"
"Laurence did what all predestined artists do: she suffered through all the misery, all the agony of unrecognized, unappreciated talent. (I)"
"People who live in a calm retreat have a marvelous instinct for imagining storms and disasters in other people's lives, and they secretly rejoice at having avoided them themselves. It is a consolation that must be allowed these people, since pride, too, has its needs, and virtue alone cannot always compensate for long hours of boredom and solitude. (II)"
"It would be a serious mistake to assume that provincial prejudices are difficult to overcome. Whatever people say about this, one can easily win or lose their goodwill by one's presence and behavior. Some say that time is a great healer: in the provinces, it is boredom which brings about change and its justification. Any kind of change in the routine of a small town appears awful at first; but after a while people recognize that it wasn't so terrible, and that, indeed, a thousand curious but timid souls were just waiting for an example to be set, to launch themselves into a career of innovation. (III)"
"...her soul began to blossom and, within her soul, the drama of her life began to unfold. (III)"
"Those who inspire in us the greatest affection are not always those for whom we have the highest regard. Tenderness does not require admiration and enthusiasm: it is based on a feeling of equality which makes us seek out in a friend a peer, a man subject to our own passions, our own weaknesses. Veneration demands a different sort of affection than that continuously openhearted intimacy we call friendship. I would have a very poor opinion of a man who could not love what he admired; I would have an even worse opinion of a man who could love only what he admired. This applies merely to friendship. Love is a different creature entirely: it lives only on enthusiasm, and all that injures its feverish delicacy blights and withers it. But the sweetest of all human emotions, the one that is nourished by calamities and mistakes as well as by greatness and heroic acts, the one that spans every stage of life, that begins to develop in us from our very first sensation of being, and that endures as long as we do, the one that parallels and actually lengthens our life, that is reborn from its ashes and that reties itself as tightly and just as firmly after being broken; that emotion, alas! is not love, as you well know, but friendship. (beginning of Chapter 1)"
"Without our even realizing it, literature performs its miracles. It revives the poetry of former days; and, putting to rest in the past all that had been for intellectuals of the past the object of just criticisms, it brings to us, like a forgotten perfume, the unrecognized riches of a taste that is no longer open to discussion, since it no longer reigns arbitrarily. Art, although it poses as egotistical ("art for art's sake"), creates progressive philosophy without realizing it. It makes its peace with the mistakes and shortcomings of the past, to preserve, as in a museum, the monuments of its conquest. (chapter 18)"
"[He] was a good man but no where near as good a philosopher. His mind was lofty, rather than broad; that is to say that he had more capacity for enthusiasm than for investigation. There was only room in that ardent brain for one idea, and that was the idea of revolution. (Chapter 21)"
"the French common people, particularly in the major cities, are considered to have infinite wit. I question the epithet. Wit only exists when one is purified by a taste that the people cannot have, this taste itself being the result of certain vices of civilization which are not those of the people. So the people have no wit, from my point of view. They have more than that: they have poetry, they have genius. With them, form is nothing. They don't waste their minds hunting for it; they take it as it comes to them. But their thoughts are full of grandeur and power, because they rest on the principle of eternal justice, disregarded by societies and preserved in their hearts. When this principle sees the light of day, no matter how it is expressed, it startles and strikes like the lightning of divine truth. (chapter 11)"
""Up till now," I said to myself, "there's been something too personal about his ambition, which portrayed the future in the light of egotism. Now that he's in love, his soul will open to ideas that are more ample, truer, more generous. Devotion will reveal itself to him, and with devotion, the need and the courage to work." (chapter 13)"
"The sorrows of love, the torment of remorse, even the worries of destitution hadn't seriously unsettled him; but the deep wound sustained by his vanity was more than enough to punish him. Unfortunately, it was not enough to correct him. (Chapter 32)"
"Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, Self-called George Sand! whose soul, amid the lions Of thy tumultuous senses, moans defiance And answers roar for roar, as spirits can: I would some mild miraculous thunder ran Above the applauded circus, in appliance Of thine own nobler nature's strength and science, Drawing two pinions, white as wings of swan, From thy strong shoulders, to amaze the place With holier light! that thou to woman's claim And man's, mightst join beside the angel's grace Of a pure genius sanctified from blame Till child and maiden pressed to thine embrace To kiss upon thy lips a stainless fame"
"Why call George Sand a wild woman in the publicity for her books? I protest the use of such an inaccurate epithet for such a cultivated and intelligent woman"
"If the author of the romantic creed was Rousseau, its popularizer and vulgarizer was George Sand."
"Sand is in my opinion, without doubt, the finest prose writer in any modern language—at least. As passionate as Rousseau, & far more picturesque. No writer perhaps ever possessed so fine an eye for nature or could convey the results with such picturesque precision."
"She was a woman of almost unprecedented intelligence and talent – a name that has gone down in history, a name that is destined not to be forgotten and not to disappear from European humanity... from my very first reading at the age of sixteen I was amazed by the strangeness of the contradiction between what was written and said about her and what I myself could see in fact. In actual fact, many, or at least some, of her heroines represented a type of such sublime moral purity as could not be imagined without a most thorough moral scrutiny within the poet’s own soul; without the acceptance of one’s full responsibility; without an understanding and a recognition of the most sublime beauty and mercy, patience, and justice."
"She had the gift of most clearly intuiting (if I may be permitted such a fancy word) a happier future awaiting humanity. All her life she believed strongly and magnanimously in the realization of those ideals precisely because she had the capacity to raise up the ideal in her own soul. The preservation of this faith to the end is usually the lot of all elevated souls, all true lovers of humanity."
"There were plenty of women writing, different kinds of women, you know...How come they did it?...How brave George Sand was!...The miracle is what women have done in this world. It’s miraculous that they did the work they did on such a high level. Where did they do it? And wearing the clothes they were wearing?"
"What time the gifted lady took Away from paper, pen, and book, She spent in amorous dalliance (They do those things so well in France)."
"Jane Harrison, the great classical anthropologist, wrote in 1914 in a letter to her friend Gilbert Murray: "By the by, about "Women," it has bothered me often-why do women never want to write poetry about Man as a sex-why is Woman a dream and a terror to man and not the other way around?... Is it mere convention and propriety, or something deeper?"...One answer to Jane Harrison's question has to be that historically men and women have played very different parts in each others' lives. Where woman has been a luxury for man, and has served as the painter's model and the poet's muse, but also as comforter, nurse, cook, bearer of his seed, secretarial assistant, and copyist of manuscripts, man has played a quite different role for the female artist. Henry James repeats an incident which the writer Prosper Mérimée described, of how, while he was living with George Sand, "he once opened his eyes, in the raw winter dawn, to see his companion, in a dressing-gown, on her knees before the domestic hearth, a candlestick beside her and a red madras round her head, making bravely, with her own hands the fire that was to enable her to sit down betimes to urgent pen and paper. The story represents him as having felt that the spectacle chilled his ardor and tried his taste; her appearance was unfortunate, her occupation an inconsequence, and her industry a reproof-the result of all which was a lively irritation and an early rupture." The specter of this kind of male judgment, along with the misnaming and thwarting of her needs by a culture controlled by males, has created problems for the woman writer: problems of contact with herself, problems of language and style, problems of energy and survival."
"No part of George Sand's Memoirs is more interesting than the description of the development of her own genius. To remember the dreams and confusions of childhood, never to lose the recollections of the curiosity and simplicity of that age, is one of the gifts of the poetic character."
"I have to confess that when I began translating Horace, I was not aware of George Sand's many gifts as a novelist. Of course I admired her outlandish behavior, that cigar-smoking woman who bushwhacked her way through the nineteenth century, wearing men's clothes when she went out hunting or when she attended the Paris theater. I enjoyed the stories of her amorous adventures, how she became the lover of famous composers, revolutionaries, writers, and actors, not all of them male. All of that is part of George Sand. But I discovered in reading this book that George Sand the historical figure is only a small corner of the picture. Sand...had a style and vocabulary that were the admiration of her literary colleagues, a wide-ranging knowledge of politics and religion, and a wonderfully catty wit, all of which she used ably in her work. Horace is one of the best examples of these skills in her oeuvre. One of Sand's most winning qualities as a novelist, though, is her empathy for her characters, an empathy that leaps over barriers of gender, class, and age."
"Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, and the George Sands of all ages. Men mock us with the fact and say we are ever cruel to each other... If this present woman must be crucified, let men drive the spikes."
"O Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom!"
"I have been reading Madame Roland's memoirs and have come to the conclusion that she was a very over-rated woman; snobbish, vain, sentimental, envious — rather a German type. Her last days before her execution were spent in chronicling petty social snubs or triumphs of many years back. She was a democrat chiefly from envy of the noblesse."
"La haine, c'est la colère des faibles!"
"Voyez-vous, mes enfants, quand le blé est mûr, il faut le couper; quand le vin est tiré, il faut le boire."
"Les enfants sont comme les hommes, l'expérience d'autrui ne leur sert pas."
"Méfie-toi de celui qui rit avant de parler!"
"Douleur toujours nouvelle pour celui qui souffre et qui se banalise pour l'entourage."
"Habile façon dont la mort fauche, fait ses coupes, mais seulement des coupes sombres. Les générations ne tombent pas d'un coup; ce serait trop triste, trop visible. Par bribes. Le pré attaqué de plusieurs côtés à la fois. Un jour, l'un; l'autre, quelque temps après; il faut de la réflexion, un regard autour de soi pour se rendre compte du vide fait, de la vaste tuerie contemporaine."
"Il n'est pas défendu, en littérature, de ramasser une arme rouillée; l'important est de savoir aiguiser la lame et d'en reforger la poignée à la mesure de sa main."
"C'est ça la gloire. Un bon cigare dans la bouche par le côté du feu et de la cendre."
"L'homme du Midi ne ment pas, il se trompe. Il ne dit pas toujours la vérité, mais il croit la dire."
"Le seul menteur du Midi, s'il y en a un, c'est le soleil. Tout ce qu'il touche, il l'exagère!"
"Où serait le mérite, si les héros n’avaient jamais peur?"
"L'épithète doit être la maîtresse du substantif, jamais sa femme légitime."
"Que de gens à bibliothèques sur la bibliothèque desquels on pourrait écrire: "Usage externe!" comme sur les fioles de pharmacie."
"A quinze ans, vingt ans tout au plus, on est déjà achevé d'imprimer."
"Les hommes vieillissent, mais ne mûrissent pas."
"I am certain that children always know more than they are able to tell, and that makes the big difference between them and adults, who, at best, know only a fraction of what they say. The reason is simply that children know everything with their whole beings, while we know it only with our heads."
"The men over thirty round about us were afraid: for their wives and their children — these were real reasons; but also for their possessions, their position, and that is what made us angry; above all for their lives, which they clung to much more than we did to ours. We were less frightened than they were. The years ahead would prove the point. Four-fifths of the Resistance in France was the work of men less than thirty years old."
"Friendship was salvation, in this fragile world the only thing left that was not fragile. I promise you one can be drunk on friendship as well as on love."
"fear kills, and joy maintains life."
"Throw yourself into each moment as if it were the only one that really existed. Work and work hard."
"My colleague had two interviews with the Chancellor yesterday, one in the morning lasting about three-quarters of an hour, when he handed over the message from Mr. Chamberlain, the other in the afternoon lasting about half an hour. Sir Nevile made every effort to convince Herr Hitler that England would fight at Poland's side. He firmly believes, so he told me, that he had succeeded. For his part, the Chancellor spoke of almost nothing but the treatment of the German minorities in Poland. Should hostilities break out, the blame, he said, would be Britain's, and, recalling that he had made reasonable proposals last April, he alleged that the British guarantee had encouraged the Poles to ill-treat the German minorities and had stiffened the Warsaw Government in its uncompromising attitude; in his view, the limit had now been reached, and if, in Sir Nevile's own words, any fresh incidents were to take place against a German in Poland, "he would march." My colleague had asked Herr Hitler, should the latter have nothing further to say to him, to have his reply delivered to him at Salzburg. Herr Hitler had sent for him, and that was the only favourable sign that the British Ambassador had gathered from his visit. During the second interview, the Chancellor again emphasized strongly the necessity for putting an end to the ill-treatment which, according to him, was being meted out to the German minorities in Poland. Sir Nevile Henderson, while doubting whether there is still any hope of avoiding the worst, considers that the only chance of, at least, delaying matters lies in the immediate establishment of contact between Warsaw and Berlin. He has, therefore, suggested to his Government that it should advise M. Beck to seek contact with the Chancellor without delay. My colleague thinks that Herr Hitler is waiting for the return of Herr von Ribbentrop to take his final decision, and that therefore only a few hours remains for this final attempt. Herr Hitler is adopting precisely the same attitude toward Poland as he did towards Czechoslovakia in the last days of September."
"In the course of an interview with Sir Nevile Henderson today, Herr Hitler made the following statement to my colleague, the substance of which I report herewith as I had it from the latter. "I am prepared," said the Chancellor, "to make one more attempt to re-establish good relations between our countries and to preserve peace. I am willing to consider, within certain limits, a disarmament programme. I still want colonies, but I can wait, three, four or even five years; in any case, this will not be grounds for a war. Moreover, it need not be a question of the former German colonies. The important thing for me is to find fats and timber." My British colleague replied that to pass on these proposals with any hope of their being useful, he would have to be convinced that Germany would not attack Poland. Herr Hitler replied: "It is impossible for me to give any such undertaking; I prefer that you should not pass on my proposals." The British Ambassador has the impression, nevertheless, that hostilities will not break out during the 48 hours that his mission will take, for he is secretly leaving for London to-morrow morning by air. I asked my colleague if Herr Hitler had not referred to Poland. He answered that the Chancellor had repeated his claims of last April, namely, the return of Danzig, and access to the Free City across the Corridor."
"Dieu est d'ordinaire pour les gros escadrons contre les petits."
"L'absence est à l'amour ce qu'est au feu le vent; Il éteint le petit, il allume le grand."
"Quand on n'a pas ce que l'on aime, Il faut aimer ce que l'on a."
"Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment decisif."
"Les anglais s’amusent tristement selon l’usage de leur pays."
"A cœur vaillant rien d'impossible."
"It used to be the custom in France to spend the whole of the summer in the country and the winter in town. By , or, at the latest, at the end of December, the chateaux were deserted, and the hotels of the filled with fashionable inhabitants. This is no longer the case. People remain in their country houses until nearly the end of winter, and though the Paris season encroaches a little on the spring, it is over by the beginning of June, and the time devoted to social enjoyment thus considerably abridged. Whether this change is for the best is a question not easily solved."
"The doctor rubbed his spectacles and opened his snuff-box with a great noise, as the young girl made the light repast, which soon brought the color to her cheek again, or, at least, the usual color, for her face was, ordinarily, very pale. Large eyes, grave and gentle, gray rather than blue, shadowed by lashes as black as her hair, made her face singular and striking. Yet, in spite of this singularity, in spite of her paleness, the delicacy of her features, and her slender figure with its willowy grace, if one wished to describe in two words the general impression produced by the aspect of Fleurange d'Yves, one would have chosen these: simplicity and strength."
"Le Récit d’une sœur, qui est pour la plus grande partie la correspondance authentique et intime d’une famille bien connue, fit grand bruit. Peu de livres de femme se sont vendus à un aussi grand nombre d’exemplaires. « Ce livre est un calice de douleurs ! » Elle a été très critiquée par Armand de Pontmartin et Barbey d’Aurevilly. Ce dernier aurait voulu que le Récit d’une sœur fût l’unique livre de Mme Craven. « La plume qui l’a écrit devrait être brisée, a-t-il dit, comme, dans certains pays, le verre avec lequel on a trinqué avec le roi. Le verre funèbre plein de délices et d’angoisses dans lequel Mme Craven a bu à la mémoire des siens ne devait plus servir à personne. Est-ce que le roi de Thulé, après avoir pleuré dans sa coupe, ne la jeta pas à la mer ? » The Tale of a Sister, which is for the most part the authentic and intimate correspondence of a well-known family, caused a great stir. Few women's books have sold such a large number of copies. "This book is a chalice of sorrows!" It was criticized in depth by and . The latter would have liked the Tale of a Sister to be Mrs. Craven's only book. "The pen that wrote it should be broken," he said, "like, in some countries, the glass with which one toasts with the king. The funeral glass full of delights and anguish from which Mrs. Craven drank in memory of her family should no longer be of use to anyone. Did not the , after weeping in his cup, throw it into the sea?""
"... one feels compelled to admit the justice of Paul Bourget's classification when he places Mrs. Craven in the pious school of novelists. ... From the material point of view her efforts were happily very successful, some of her stories having had an extensive sale. Yet it would be a daring speculation to assert either that she created her reading public or robbed the realistic writers of theirs. Most probably she wrote for a public which already existed—the pious Catholic world in France—and in so doing has laid herself open to the stigma of having "written books for girls." The best which can be said of Mrs. Craven's novels is, that they are conventional romances written by a clever woman."
"Men call physicians only when they suffer; women, when they are merely afflicted with ennui."
"To weep is not always to suffer."
"If you would succeed in the world, it is necessary that, when entering a salon, your vanity should bow to that of others."
"Homeliness is the best guardian of a young girl's virtue."
"For my part, I remained a close prisoner, without a visit from a single person, none of my most intimate friends daring to come near me, through the apprehension that such a step might prove injurious to their interests. Thus it is ever in Courts. Adversity is solitary, while prosperity dwells in a crowd; the object of persecution being sure to be shunned by his nearest friends and dearest connections."
"Besides, I had found a secret pleasure, during my confinement, from the perusal of good books, to which I had given myself up with a delight I never before experienced. I consider this as an obligation I owe to fortune, or, rather, to Divine Providence, in order to prepare me, by such efficacious means, to bear up against the misfortunes and calamities that awaited me. By tracing nature in the universal book which is opened to all mankind, I was led to the knowledge of the Divine Author. Science conducts us, step by step, through the whole range of creation, until we arrive, at length, at God. Misfortune prompts us to summon our utmost strength to oppose grief and recover tranquillity, until at length we find a powerful aid in the knowledge and love of God, whilst prosperity hurries us away until we are overwhelmed by our passions. My captivity and its consequent solitude afforded me the double advantage of exciting a passion for study, and an inclination for devotion, advantages I had never experienced during the vanities and splendour of my prosperity."