Top 190 Quotes & Sayings by Madame de Stael - Page 2

Who understands much, forgives much.

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

The language of religion can alone suit every situation and every mode of feeling.

Life, for me, is living among my friends.

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

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

Be happy, but be happy through piety.

Morality must guide calculation, and calculation must guide politics.

Every time a new nation, America or Russia for instance, advances toward civilization, the human race perfects itself; every time an inferior class emerges from enslavement and degradation, the human race again perfects itself.

[On Russia:] In every way, there is something gigantic about this people: ordinary dimensions have no applications whatever to it. I do not mean by this that true greatness and stability are never met with; but their boldness, their imaginativeness knows no bounds. With them everything is colossal rather than well-proportioned, audacious rather than well-considered, and if they do not attain their goals, it is because they exceed them.

Unhappy love freezes all our affections: our own souls grow inexplicable to us. More than we gained while we were happy we lose by the reverse.

O Earth! All bathed with blood and tears, yet never, Hast thou ceased putting forth thy fruit and flowers.

Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time.

Prayer is the life of the soul.

Madame de Stael 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."

the last steps of life are ever slow and difficult.

Kindness and generosity ... form the true morality of human actions.

The entire social order ... is arrayed against a woman who wants to rise to a man's reputation.

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

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

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.

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

Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness, and baseness.

[On Italian:] One may almost call it a language that talks of itself, and always seems more witty than its speakers.

Have you not observed that faith is generally strongest in those whose character may be called the weakest?

I do not want an echo of myself from my children. I do not want to hear from them merely the reverberation of my own voice.

Love, supreme power of the heart, mysterious enthusiasm that encloses in itself all poetry, all heroism, all religion!

Purity of mind and conduct is the first glory of a woman.

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.

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.

What matters in a character is not whether one holds this or that opinion: what matters is how proudly one upholds it.

Love which is only an episode in the life of men, is the entire history of the life of women.

Anyone who can see as far as tomorrow in politics arouses the wrath of people who can see no farther than today.

Love is the symbol of eternity.

Love is above the laws, above the opinion of men; it is the truth, the flame, the pure element, the primary idea of the moral world.

To pray together, in whatever tongue or ritual, is the most tender brotherhood of hope and sympathy that man can contract in this life.

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

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

[On Napoleon:] One has the impression of an imperious wind blowing about one's ears when one is near that man.

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

When once enthusiasm has been turned into ridicule, everything is undone except money and power.

Life teaches much, but to all thinking persons it brings ever closer the will of God - not because their faculties decline, but on the contrary, because they increase.

Thought can never be compared with action, but when it awakens in us the image of truth.

Why shouldn't man be as angry about not having always been alive as about having to stop being alive?

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.

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

Whatever is natural admits of variety.

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

The most beautiful landscapes in the world, if they evoke no memory, if they bear no trace of a remarkable event, are uninteresting compared to historic landscapes.

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

One must, so long as there is any life left, back up the character of one's life.

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.

The people are as severe toward the clergy as toward women; they want to see absolute devotion to duty from both.

Conscience is doubtless sufficient to conduct the coldest character into the road of virtue; but enthusiasm is to conscience what honor is to duty; there is in us a superfluity of soul, which it is sweet to consecrate to the beautiful when the good has been accomplished.

The mind's pleasures are made to calm the tempests of the heart.

Where no interest is takes in science, literature and liberal pursuits, mere facts and insignificant criticisms necessarily become the themes of discourse; and minds, strangers alike to activity and meditation, become so limited as to render all intercourse with them at once tasteless and oppressive.

I learn life from the poets.

Only the refined and delicate pleasures that spring from research and education can build up barriers between different ranks.

Taste is to literature what bon ton is in society.

[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.