"What is it in man that for a long while lies unknown and unseen only one day to emerge and push him into a new land of the eye, a new region of the mind, a place he has never dreamed of? Maybe it's like the force in spores lying quietly under asphalt until the day they push a soft, bulbous mushroom head right through the pavement. There's nothing you can do to stop it."

"At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. If he's being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that's a fulfilling notion. But if he's in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid."

"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."

"Who talks from thought and reflection is rarely eloquent; Madame de Staël was the only exception I ever knew to that rule."

"Madame de Staël, daughter of M. Necker, is now at the head of the colony of French noblesse, established near Mickleham. She is one of the first women I have ever met with for abilities and extraordinary intellect."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent."

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

"Be happy, but be so by piety."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"Men do not change; they unmask themselves."

"Genius has no sex!"

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

"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."

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

"The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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.""