Edmond De Goncourt Quotes
"Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity."
- Edmond De Goncourt
(Related: Act, Despair, Infinity)
"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
(Related: Age, Men, Truth, Reason, Sadness)
"The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman."
- Edmond De Goncourt
(Related: Enemy, Woman)
"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
(Related: English, Nation)
"That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum."
- Edmond De Goncourt
(Related: Nonsense, World)
"People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug."
- Edmond de Goncourt
(Related: People)
"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
(Related: Love, Absence, First, Today)
"If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion."
- Edmond de Goncourt
(Related: Religion, God, Atheism, Insult)
"A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world."
- Edmond de Goncourt
(Related: Opinions, Painting, World)
"Genius is the talent of a person who is dead."
- Edmond de Goncourt
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present."
- Edmond de Goncourt
(Related: Historians, Past, Present)
"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
(Related: Life, Civilization, World, Years)
"As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture."
- Edmond De Goncourt
(Related: Truth, Impression)
"A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin."
- Edmond de Goncourt
(Related: Man)
"Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins."
- Edmond de Goncourt
(Related: Laughter, Mind, Sound)