De Goncourt Quotes & Sayings

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. — Edmond De Goncourt

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

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

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

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

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

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug. — Edmond De Goncourt

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

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. — Edmond De Goncourt

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

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

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. — 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. — Edmond De Goncourt

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

Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate. — Edmond De Goncourt

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. — Edmond De Goncourt

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

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

Princes enjoy themselves like children in the company of ordinary human beings. — Edmond De Goncourt

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead. — Edmond De Goncourt

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present. — Edmond De Goncourt

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

[He] went on to say that during all those years he had done nothing at all, that all he had felt had been a need to live, to live actively, violently, noisily, a need to sing, to make music, to roam the woods, to drink a little too much and get involved in a brawl. — Edmond De Goncourt

Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs. — Edmond De Goncourt

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. — Edmond De Goncourt

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

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. — Edmond De Goncourt

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. — Edmond De Goncourt

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences. — Edmond De Goncourt

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. — Edmond De Goncourt

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. — Edmond De Goncourt