Madame Stael Quotes & Sayings

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

When at eve, at the bounding of the landscape, the heavens appear to recline so slowly on the earth, imagination pictures beyond the horizon an asylum of hope, - a native land of love; and nature seems silently to repeat that man is immortal. — Madame De Stael

Carla Hesse has given us an astonishing new look at women's struggle for independent expression and moral autonomy during the French Revolution and afterward. Denied the political and civil rights of men, literary women plunged into the expanded world of publication, answering the men's philosophical treatises with provocative novels about women's choices and chances. Lively and learned, The Other Enlightenment links women from Madame de Stael to Simone de Beauvoir in an alternate and daring path to the modern. — Natalie Zemon Davis

Speech happens to not be his language. — Madame De Stael

How much past there is in a life, however brief it be. — Madame De Stael

And all the bustle of departure - sometimes sad, sometimes intoxicating - just as fear or hope may be inspired by the new chances of coming destiny. — Madame De Stael

The egotism of woman is always for two. — 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

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. — Madame De Stael

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. — Madame De Stael

There is no reality on this earth except religion and the power of love; all the rest is even more fugitive than life itself. — Madame De Stael

Man's most valuable faculty is his imagination. — Madame De Stael

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. — Madame De Stael

Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty. — Madame De Stael

If it were not for respect for human opinions, I would not open my window to see the Bay of Naples for the first time, whilst I would go five hundred leagues to talk with a man of genius whom I had not seen. — Madame De Stael

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

[Moralistic] novels are at the same disadvantage as teachers: children never believe them, because they make everything that happens relate to the lesson at hand. — Madame De Stael

The pursuit of politics is religion, morality, and poetry all in one. — Madame De Stael

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

Inventiveness is childish, practice sublime. — Madame De Stael

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

[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. — Madame De Stael

Nothing is so horrifying as the possibility of existing simply because we do not know how to die. — Madame De Stael

We understand death only after it has placed its hands on someone we love. — Madame De Stael

The life of famous men was more glorious in antiquity; the life of obscure men is happier with the moderns. — 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

To live beneath sorrow, one must yield to it. — Madame De Stael

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

Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness, and baseness. — Madame De Stael

Glory can be for a woman but the brilliant morning of happiness. — Madame De Stael

Life resembles Gobelin tapestry; you do not see the canvass on the right side; but when you turn it, the threads are visible. — Madame De Stael

Be happy, but be happy through piety. — Madame De Stael

Venice astonishes more than it pleases at first sight ... — Madame De Stael

The face of a woman, whatever be the force or extent of her mind, whatever be the importance of the object she pursues, is always an obstacle or a reason in the story of her life. — Madame De Stael

I desire no other proof of Christianity than the Lord's Prayer. — Madame De Stael

Taste is to literature what bon ton is in society. — Madame De Stael

Love is admiring with the heart. And admiring is loving with the mind. — 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 entire social order ... is arrayed against a woman who wants to rise to a man's reputation. — Madame De Stael

The mind's pleasures are made to calm the tempests of the heart. — Madame De Stael

Happiness is a wondrous commodity: the more you give, the more you have. — Madame De Stael

Frivolity, under whatever form it appears, deprives attention of its power, thought of its originality, and sentiment of its depth. — Madame De Stael

The mind may be exhausted, but the language of the heart is inexhaustible. — Madame De Stael

One must choose in life between boredom and suffering. — Madame De Stael

Let us then blend everything: love, religion, genius, with sunshine, perfume, music, and poetry. — 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

In Italy, almost at every step, history and poetry add to the graces of nature, sweeten the memory of the past, and seem to preserve it in eternal youth. — Madame De Stael

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. — Madame De Stael

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

When we destroy an old prejudice, we have need of a new virtue. — Madame De Stael

Nothing recalls the past like music ... — Madame De Stael

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

Society develops wit, but its contemplation alone forms genius. — 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

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

Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be, not to write at all. — Madame De Stael

Men err from selfishness; women because they are weak. — 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

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

Superstition is related to this life, religion to the next; superstition is allied to fatality, religion to virtue; it is by the vivacity of earthly desires that we become superstitious; it is, on the contrary, by the sacrifice of these desires that we become religious. — Madame De Stael

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

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

Intellect does not attain its full force unless it attacks power. — Madame De Stael

The feminine graces of Madame de Sevigne's genius are exquisitely charming; but the philosophy and eloquence of Madame de Stael are above the distinction of sex. — James Mackintosh

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

When men do wrong, it is out of hardness; when women do wrong, it is out of weakness. — Madame De Stael

Her imperturbable self-confidence (Duchesse de Maine) caused Madame de Stael to write that the Duchesse believed in herself the same way she believed in God, without explanation or discussion. — Antonia Fraser

Purity of mind and conduct is the first glory of a woman. — Madame De Stael

I must keep on rowing, not until I reach port but until I reach my grave. — Madame De Stael

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. — Madame De Stael

Self-love, so sensitive in its own cause, has rarely any sympathy to spare for others. — Madame De Stael

If one hour's work is enough to govern France, four minutes is all that is needed for Italy. There is no nation more easily frightened; even its poetic imagination predisposes it to fear, and they look upon power as on an image that fills them with terror. — Madame De Stael

There are women vain of advantages not connected with their persons, such as birth, rank, and fortune; it is difficult to feel less the dignity of the sex. The origin of all women may be called celestial, for their power is the offspring of the gifts of Nature; by yielding to pride and ambition they soon destroy the magic of their charms. — Madame De Stael

There is no second country for an Englishman, except a ship and the sea. — Madame De Stael

Kindness and generosity ... form the true morality of human actions. — Madame De Stael

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. — Madame De Stael

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

[The Germans] so easily confuse obstinacy with energy, and rudeness with firmness. — Madame De Stael

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

Prayer is the life of the soul. — Madame De Stael

Conversation as talent exists only in France. In other countries, conversation provides politeness, discussion, and friendship; in France, it is an art for which imagination and soul are certainly very welcome, but which can also provide its own secret remedies to compensate you for the absence of either or both, if you so desire. — Madame De Stael

Morality must guide calculation, and calculation must guide politics. — Madame De Stael

Exile: A tomb in which you can get mail. — Madame De Stael

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

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

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

We always cut our poetical theories to suit our talent ... — Madame De Stael

Anything that happens gradually is always irrevocable. — 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

It is obvious that the most despotic forms of social organization would be suitable for inert men who are satisfied with the situation fate has placed them in, and that the most abstract form of democratic theory would be practicable among sages guided only by their reason. The only problem is to what degree it is possible to excite or to contain the passions without endangering public happiness. — Madame De Stael

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it. — Madame De Stael

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

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. — Madame De Stael

A perfect piece of architecture kindles that aimless reverie, which bears the soul we know not whither. — Madame De Stael

In the history of the human mind there has never been a useful thought or a profound truth that has not found its century and admirers. — Madame De Stael

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

It is not enough to forgive; one must forget. — 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