Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve Quotes & Sayings

Despair itself if it goes on long enough, can become a kind of sanctuary in which one settles down and feels at ease. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

If I had a device, it would be the true, the true only, leaving the beautiful and the good to settle matters afterwards as best they could. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

With everyone born human, a poet - an artist - is born, who dies young and who is survived by an adult. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

What signifies the ladder, provided one rise and attain the end? — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

In most men there exists a poet who died young, whom the man survived. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

I have always thought that if we began for one moment to say what we thought, society would collapse. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

The greatest of all French critics, and possibly the greatest European critic since Aristotle . — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

A philosophical thought has probably not attained all its sharpness and all its illumination until it is expressed in French — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the first-raters. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Since it is necessary to have enemies, let us endeavour to have those who do us honour. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

If you want to succeed, limit yourself. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three [Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden and George Saintsbury], the greatest critic that ever lived - not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Tell me who loves, who admires you, and I will tell you who you are. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Nature wants us to enjoy life to the full and die without giving it a second thought; Christianity wants the opposite. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Most celebrated men live in a condition of prostitution. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve