Edmond de Goncourt Quotes
-
If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.
-
Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.
-
The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.
-
A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
-
Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.
-
Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.
-
Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.
-
Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.
-
Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
-
Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.
-
That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.
-
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-
People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.
-
The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals.