Madame De Stael quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Madame De Stael

Madame De Stael Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Madame De Stael on Wise Famous Quotes.

The last steps of life are ever slow and difficult.

Thought can never be compared with action, but when it awakens in us the image of truth.

To live beneath sorrow, one must yield to it.

And all the bustle of departure - sometimes sad, sometimes intoxicating - just as fear or hope may be inspired by the new chances of coming destiny.

Taste is to literature what bon ton is in society.

Love is the whole history of a woman's life, it is but an episode in a man's.

Only the refined and delicate pleasures that spring from research and education can build up barriers between different ranks.

One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.

What matters in a character is not whether one holds this or that opinion: what matters is how proudly one upholds it.

Intellect does not attain its full force unless it attacks power.

Women have no existence except in love; the history of their life begins and ends with love!

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

There is not enough interest in life to spread over twenty-four hours when one can't sleep.

Be happy, but be happy through piety.

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

Love which is only an episode in the life of men, is the entire history of the life of women.

The most careful reasoning characters are very often the most easily abashed.

Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts.

When a noble life has prepared for old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.

How true it is that, sooner or later, the' most rebellious must bow beneath the yoke of misfortune!

Love is the symbol of eternity.

It is difficult to grow old gracefully.

The more we know the better we forgive. Whoever feels deeply, feels for all who live.

Inventiveness is childish, practice sublime.

Anyone who can see as far as tomorrow in politics arouses the wrath of people who can see no farther than today.

The sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it; enthusiasm signifies God in us.

Glory can be for a woman but the brilliant morning of happiness.

A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.

Life, for me, is living among my friends.

There are only two distinct classes of people on this earth, those who espouse enthusiasm and those who despise it.

Men err from selfishness; women because they are weak.

Why shouldn't man be as angry about not having always been alive as about having to stop being alive?

The more I see of man, the more I like dogs.

Unhappy love freezes all our affections: our own souls grow inexplicable to us. More than we gained while we were happy we lose by the reverse.

A voyage without companionship, that is to say without conversation, is one of the saddest pleasures of life.

[On Italian:] One may almost call it a language that talks of itself, and always seems more witty than its speakers.

The world is the work of a single thought, expressed in a thousand different ways.

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

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

Love is admiring with the heart. And admiring is loving with the mind.

The mind's pleasures are made to calm the tempests of the heart.

The entire social order ... is arrayed against a woman who wants to rise to a man's reputation.

Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike.

Never, never have I been loved as I love others!

In women's destiny everything goes downhill except for thought, whose immortal nature it is to keep constantly rising.

I do not want an echo of myself from my children. I do not want to hear from them merely the reverberation of my own voice.

The study of history, it seems to me, leads to the conviction that all important events tend toward the same end - the civilization of mankind.

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

The life of famous men was more glorious in antiquity; the life of obscure men is happier with the moderns.

A perfect piece of architecture kindles that aimless reverie, which bears the soul we know not whither.

Morality must guide calculation, and calculation must guide politics.

Between God and love, I recognize no mediator but my conscience ...

There is no second country for an Englishman, except a ship and the sea.

Gaiety pleases more when we are assured that it does not cover carelessness.

The more I see of men the more I like dogs.

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

Life resembles Gobelin tapestry; you do not see the canvass on the right side; but when you turn it, the threads are visible.

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

What is love, if it can calculate and provide against its own decay?

The education of life perfects the thinking mind, but depraves the frivolous.

Venice astonishes more than it pleases at first sight ...

[The Germans] so easily confuse obstinacy with energy, and rudeness with firmness.

A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.

Prayer is the life of the soul.

The people are as severe toward the clergy as toward women; they want to see absolute devotion to duty from both.

Happy the land where the writers are sad, the merchants satisfied, the rich melancholic, and the populace content.

Danger is like wine, it goes to your head.

Purity of mind and conduct is the first glory of a woman.

Whatever is natural admits of variety.

One must, so long as there is any life left, back up the character of one's life.

The thing that must be preserved in all situations whatever is the reputation of one's character.

Men have made of fortune an all-powerful goddess, in order that she may be made responsible for all their blunder's.

The greater part of what women write about women is mere sycophancy to man.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

To pray together, in whatever tongue or ritual, is the most tender brotherhood of hope and sympathy that man can contract in this life.

Music revives the recollections it would appease.

The greatest happiness is to transform one's feelings into action.

However old a conjugal union, it still garners some sweetness. Winter has some cloudless days, and under the snow a few flowers still bloom.

To be totally understanding makes one very indulgent.

It is not enough to forgive; one must forget.

The universe is in France; outside it, there is nothing.

Speech happens to not be his language.

Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be, not to write at all.

Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.

Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness, and baseness.

Providence protects us in all the details of our lot.

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

Anything that happens gradually is always irrevocable.

[On Napoleon:] One has the impression of an imperious wind blowing about one's ears when one is near that man.

O memory, thou bitter sweet,
both a joy and a scourge!

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

Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.

Truth and, by consequence, liberty, will always be the chief power of honest men.

All music, even if its occasion be a gay one, renders us pensive.

Life often seems like a long shipwreck of which the debris are friendship, glory, and love. - The shores of existence are strewn with them.

Kindness and generosity ... form the true morality of human actions.

There is no reality on this earth except religion and the power of love; all the rest is even more fugitive than life itself.

Man's most valuable faculty is his imagination.

The language of religion can alone suit every situation and every mode of feeling.

It seems to me that we become more dear one to the other, in together admiring works of art, which speak to the soul by their true grandeur.