"Feminist literary critics have shown how in the 19th century women writers began to acknowledge women as their muses and their role models... Elizabeth Barrett Browning admired the work of George Sand and Mme. de Staël, while her work, in its turn, was an inspiration to Emily Dickinson. Margaret Fuller and Sarah Orne Jewett acknowledged their indebtedness to Mme. de Staël, the author of Corinne... The list could be indefinitely extended to show the almost desperate search of writing women for authoritative female predecessors."

"Le sens de ce mot, chez les Grecs, en est la plus noble définition: l'enthousiasme signifie Dieu en nous ."

"The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man."

"La voix de la conscience est si délicate, qu'il est facile d'étouffer; mais elle est si pure, qu'il est impossible de la méconnaître."

"La religion n'est rien si elle n'est pas tout, si l'existence n'en est pas remplie."

"L'esprit consiste à connaître la ressemblance des choses diverses et la différence des choses semblables."

"L'admiration pour le beau se rapporte toujours à la Divinité."

"Be happy, but be so by piety."

"Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities."

"La recherche de la vérité est la plus noble des occupations, et sa publication un devoir."

"There is perhaps too much freedom in Protestantism to satisfy a certain religious austerity, which may seize upon the man who is overwhelmed by great misfortunes; sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane."

"Danger is like wine, it goes to your head."

"O Earth! all bathed with blood and tears, yet never Hast thou ceased putting forth thy fruit and flowers."

"A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn."

"Ought not every woman, like every man, to follow the bent of her own talents?"

"Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent."

"Ces règles ne sont que des barrières pour empêcher les enfants de tomber."

"Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness, and baseness."

"La vue d'un tel monument est comme une musique continuelle et fixée, qui vous attend pour vous faire du bien quand vous vous en approchez."

"When men do wrong, it is out of hardness; when women do wrong, it is out of weakness."

"You do not reach the sublime by degrees; the distance between it and the merely beautiful is infinite."

"Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it."

"Frivolity, under whatever form it appears, deprives attention of its power, thought of its originality, and sentiment of its depth."

"Tout ce qui est naturel est varié."

"Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end: we fancy that we have always possessed what we love, so difficult is it to imagine how we could have lived without it."

"When once enthusiasm has been turned into ridicule, everything is undone except money and power."

"Madame de Staël thought it was pride in mankind to endeavour to penetrate the secret of the universe; and speaking of the higher metaphysics she said: "I prefer the Lord's Prayer to it all.""

"Sow good services: sweet remembrances will grow from them."

"You [America] are the vanguard of the human race. You are the world’s future."

"Men do not change; they unmask themselves."

"Life often seems like a long shipwreck, of which the débris are friendship, fame, and love."

"Genius has no sex!"

"Beauty is one in the universe, and, whatever form it assumes, it always arouses a religious feeling in the hearts of mankind."

"I must keep on rowing, not until I reach port but until I reach my grave."

"One must, in one's life, make a choice between boredom and suffering."

"Un homme doit savoir braver l'opinion; une femme s'y soumettre."

"If we would succeed in works of the imagination, we must offer a mild morality in the midst of rigid manners; but where the manners are corrupt, we must consistently hold up to view an austere morality."

"It seems to me that life's circumstances, being ephemeral, teach us less about durable truths than the fictions based on those truths; and that the best lessons of delicacy and self-respect are to be found in novels where the feelings are so naturally portrayed that you fancy you are witnessing real life as you read."

"On cesse de s'aimer si quelqu'un ne nous aime."

"L'amour est l'histoire de la vie des femmes; c'est un épisode dans celle des hommes."

"In matters of the heart, nothing is true except the improbable."

"The evil arising from mental improvement can be corrected only by a still further progress in that very improvement. Either morality is a fable, or the more enlightened we are, the more attached to it we become."

"Superstition attaches to this life, and religion to the next; superstition is allied to fatality, and religion to virtue; it is from the vivacity of earthly desires that we become superstitious, and it is, on the contrary, by the sacrifice of these same desires that we are religious."

"Let us then blend everything: love, religion, genius, with sunshine, perfume, music, and poetry."

"No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself. And the most objective books are the most deceptive. The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest."

"The Western misreading of the Soviet system was largely the product of a simple reflex. ... Whatever its doubtless temporary — or invented — faults (so the thinking went), the Soviet ideology stood for a better world. ... [E]ven Romain Rolland, the sensitive follower of Gandhi, spoke out in defense of the purges."

"That I have been allowed to exchange a greeting with you will remain a happy memory to the end of my days."

"Goethe and Romain Rolland paint psychological landscapes, depicting both characters and spiritual conditions, but the Japanese-Flaubertian analytical tanka is a form alien to them."