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

Quotes to Explore
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I remember the first time I went to Italy when I was eighteen, I was in Florence and there were all these eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds gliding past on Vespas with crinkly, long, hair, and I thought I was on the set of a movie. I couldn't believe that this was going on and I hadn't known about it before. I was flabbergasted.
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You can never plan the future by the past.
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I chose to present myself as one who comes from among the people, and I can be touched by their pain because I have my own.
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Sometimes, just the act of venting is helpful. Counseling provides a safe haven for precisely that kind of free-ranging release: You can say things in the therapist's office, with the therapist present, that would be incendiary or hurtful in your living room.
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To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.
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It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.
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The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again I'd make all the same mistakes - only sooner.
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I never felt the need to introduce all the obstacles in my past when I say, 'Hello, my name is Nate.' But at the same time, I've never hidden from it.
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Present annual world energy consumption is about equal to the annihilation energy of 4 tons of matter.
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I don't like the road. I love being on the track. I like being indoors and the fact I'm not battling past 200 other riders.
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I probably prefer Spanish football to the others. It's very technical, the way they play; they keep the ball well, and whenever Spurs have played against Spanish teams in the past, they've always made it difficult for us.
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On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.
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People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor.
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Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.
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In the past, on Earth, it has largely been to exploit foreign resources and to expand the domestic territory.
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I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.
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If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
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The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.
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As an artist, the most important thing and the most special thing is when your intention shines through on the work.
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Sappho was a worshipper of the Aphrodite cult and on the island of Lesbos there were many cliff-jumpers. They all jumped. Some may say they flew in ecstasy. If only for nine seconds - one second for each string of the lyre.
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The large body of the swan wedged in the shattered glass of the car windscreen fills the film frame. Its head is bent back on itself in a parody of its orthodox gracefulness.
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That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.