Top 190 Quotes & Sayings by Madame de Stael

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French writer Madame de Stael.

Last updated on December 23, 2024.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, commonly known as Madame de Staël, was a French woman of letters and political theorist, the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a leading salonnière. She was a voice of moderation in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era up to the French Restoration. She was present at the Estates General of 1789 and at the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Her intellectual collaboration with Benjamin Constant between 1794 and 1810 made them one of the most celebrated intellectual couples of their time. She discovered sooner than others the tyrannical character and designs of Napoleon. For many years she lived as an exile – firstly during the Reign of Terror and later due to personal persecution by Napoleon.

French - Writer | April 22, 1766 - July 14, 1817

Source: Wikipedia

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

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

Sow good services: sweet remembrances will grow from them.

Madame de Stael

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.

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

To be totally understanding makes one very indulgent.

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us.

Madame de Stael

Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts.

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

Speech happens to not be his language.

Madame de Stael

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.

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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.

Madame de Stael

One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

Men err from selfishness; women because they are weak.

Madame de Stael

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.

Madame de Stael

A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

It is difficult to grow old gracefully.

Madame de Stael

The success of any man with any woman is apt to displease even his best friends.

Madame de Stael

Of all human sentiments, enthusiasm creates the most happiness; it is the only sentiment in fact which gives real happiness, the only sentiment which can help us to bear our human destiny in any situation in which we may find ourselves.

Madame de Stael

Exile: A tomb in which you can get mail.

Madame de Stael

Nothing recalls the past like music.

Madame de Stael

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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.

Madame de Stael

Men do not change; they unmask themselves.

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

Enthusiasm signifies 'God in us.'

Madame de Stael

When men do wrong, it is out of hardness; when women do wrong, it is out of weakness.

Madame de Stael

Divine Wisdom, intending to detain us some time on earth, has done well to cover with a veil the prospect of the life to come; for if our sight could clearly distinguish the opposite bank, who would remain on this tempestuous coast of time?

Madame de Stael

It is not enough to forgive; one must forget.

Madame de Stael

Goethe has made a remark upon the perfectability of the human mind, which is full of sagacity: It is always advancing, but in a spiral line.

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

I believe that happiness consists in having a destiny in keeping with our abilities. Our desires are things of the moment, often harmful even to ourselves; but our abilities are permanent, and their demands never cease.

Madame de Stael

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

Madame de Stael

Who understands much forgives much. To understand everything makes us very forgiving.

Madame de Stael

When we destroy an old prejudice, we have need of a new virtue.

Madame de Stael

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.

Madame de Stael

Poetry is the apotheosis of sentiment.

Madame de Stael

intellect is a sin that must be atoned for by leading exactly the life of those who have none.

Madame de Stael

The mind may be exhausted, but the language of the heart is inexhaustible.

Madame de Stael

Happiness is a wondrous commodity: the more you give, the more you have.

Madame de Stael

[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.

Madame de Stael

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