Madame de Stael Quotations

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

Men err from selfishness; women because they are weak.

Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts.

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

To be totally understanding makes one very indulgent.

Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation the source of strength is one's self. When one prays he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.

We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us.

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

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

One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.

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

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.

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

The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.

A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.

Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man's power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened.

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

Wit consists in knowing the resemblance of things that differ, and the difference of things that are alike.

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

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.

Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation, the source of strength is one's self. When one prays, he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.

The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.

Sow good services: sweet remembrances will grow from them.

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

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

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

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

We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love

Love is the emplem of eternity; it confounds all notions of time; effaces all memory of begining, all fear of an end.

[Moralistic] novels are at the same disadvantage as teachers: children never believe them, because they make everything that happens relate to the lesson at hand.

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

Love is the history of a woman's life; it is an episode in man's. [Fr., L'amour est l'histoire de la vie des femmes; c'est un episode dans celle des hommes.]

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

The only equitable manner in my opinion, of judging the character of a man is to examine if there are personal calculations in his conduct; if there are not, we may blame his manner of judging, but we are not the less bound to esteem him.

Strangers are contemporary posterity. [Fr., Les etrangers sont la posterite contemporaine.]

Mystery such as is given of God is beyond the power of human penetration, yet not in opposition to it.

Tombs decked by the arts can scarcely represent death as a formidable enemy; we do not, indeed, like the ancients, carve sports and dances in the sarcophagus, but thought is diverted from the bier by works that tell of immortality, even from the altar of death.

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

Genius inspires this thirst for fame: there is no blessing undesired by those to whom Heaven gave the means of winning it.

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

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

Poetry is the apotheosis of sentiment.

Providence protects us in all the details of our lot.

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.

Exile: A tomb in which you can get mail.

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

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

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

Nature, who permits no two leaves to be exactly alike, has given a still greater diversity to human minds. Imitation, then, is a double murder; for it deprives both copy and original of their primitive existence.

New doctrines ever displease the old. They like to fancy that the world has been losing wisdom, instead of gaining it, since they were young.

nothing is so horrifying as the possibility of existing simply because we do not know how to die.

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

A Gothic building engenders true religion ... The light, falling through colored glass, the singular forms of the architecture, unite to give a silent image of that infinite mystery which the soul for ever feels, and never comprehends.

There are women vain of advantages not connected with their persons, such as birth, rank, and fortune; it is difficult to feel less the dignity of the sex. The origin of all women may be called celestial, for their power is the offspring of the gifts of Nature; by yielding to pride and ambition they soon destroy the magic of their charms.

Taste is to literature what bon ton is in society.

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

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.

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.

Love is the symbol of eternity.

It is obvious that the most despotic forms of social organization would be suitable for inert men who are satisfied with the situation fate has placed them in, and that the most abstract form of democratic theory would be practicable among sages guided only by their reason. The only problem is to what degree it is possible to excite or to contain the passions without endangering public happiness.

I desire no other proof of Christianity than the Lord's Prayer.

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.

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.

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.

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

Be happy, but be happy through piety.

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

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.

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

I learn life from the poets.

When at eve, at the bounding of the landscape, the heavens appear to recline so slowly on the earth, imagination pictures beyond the horizon an asylum of hope, - a native land of love; and nature seems silently to repeat that man is immortal.

Enthusiasm gives life to what is invisible; and interest to what has no immediate action on our comfort in this world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The memories which come to us through music are not accompanied by any regrets; for a moment music gives us back the pleasures it retraces, and we feel them again rather than recollect them.

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

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

nothing recalls the past like music ...

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

I am glad that I am not a man, for then I should have to marry a woman.

Anything that happens gradually is always irrevocable.

... in the history of the human mind there has never been a useful thought or a profound truth that has not found its century and admirers.

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

[Ridicule] laughs at all those who see the earnestness of life and who still believe in true feelings and in serious thought ... It soils the hope of youth. Only shameless vice is above its reach.

No nation has the right to bring about a revolution, even though such a change may be most urgently needed, if the price is the blood of one single innocent individual ...

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

Whatever efforts one may make, one must revert to the realization that religion is the real basis of morality; religion is the real and perceptible purpose within us, which alone, can turn aside our attention from things. ... The science of morality can no more teach human beings to be honest, in all the magnificence of this word, than geometry can teach one how to draw.

Prayer is the life of the soul.

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.

[To Bonaparte, when asked why she meddled in politics:] Sire, when women have their heads cut off, it is but just they should know the reason.

we always cut our poetical theories to suit our talent ...

the last steps of life are ever slow and difficult.

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