Top 30 Quotes & Sayings by Edmond de Goncourt

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

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.

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

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.

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.

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.

Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.

Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.

There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.

She is unable to dream, think or love. In a woman, poetry never comes naturally, but always as the result of education. Only the woman of the world is a woman; the rest are simply females.

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

Princes enjoy themselves like children in the company of ordinary human beings.

Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person, and as such is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds? There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.

I feel sure that coups d'état would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.

Any man who does not see everything in terms of self, that is to say who wants to be something in respect of other men, to do good to them or simply give them something to do, is unhappy, disconsolate, and accursed.

The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are. The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

One of the proud joys of the man of letters - if that man of letters is an artist - is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.

The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.