Jules De Goncourt Quotes & Sayings

A human being sheds its leaves like a tree. Sickness prunes it down; and it no longer offers the same silhouette to the eyes which loved it, to the people to whom it afforded shade and comfort. — Jules De Goncourt

Never speak of yourself to others; make them talk about themselves instead; therein lies the whole art of pleasing. Everybody knows it, and everyone forgets it. — Jules De Goncourt

History is a novel which did take place; a novel is history that could take place. — Jules De Goncourt

Only a woman of the world is a woman; the rest are females. — Jules De Goncourt

After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement. — Jules De Goncourt

The real connoisseurs in art are those who make people accept as beautiful something everybody used to consider ugly, by revealing and resuscitating the beauty in it. — Jules De Goncourt

There are two infinities in this world: God up above, and down below, human baseness. — Jules De Goncourt

When incredulity becomes a faith, it is less rational than a religion. — Jules De Goncourt

Time cures one of everything-even of living. — Jules De Goncourt

There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures me as to our value: the boredom that afflicts us. It is the hall-mark of quality in modern men. — Jules De Goncourt

Antiquity was perhaps created to provide professors with their bread and butter. — Jules De Goncourt