Germaine de Staël Quotes

The sight of such a monument is like continual and stationary music, which one hears for one's good as one approaches it.

La vue d'un tel monument est comme une musique continuelle et fixée, qui vous attend pour vous faire du bien quand vous vous en approchez.

You do not reach the sublime by degrees; the distance between it and the merely beautiful is infinite.

When once enthusiasm has been turned into ridicule, everything is undone except money and power.

All that is natural is varied.

Tout ce qui est naturel est varié.

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

Men do not change; they unmask themselves.

Sow good services: sweet remembrances will grow from them.

Madame de Staël thought it was pride in mankind to endeavour to penetrate the secret of the universe; and speaking of the higher metaphysics she said: "I prefer the Lord's Prayer to it all."

You [America] are the vanguard of the human race. You are the world’s future.

I must keep on rowing, not until I reach port but until I reach my grave.

Life often seems like a long shipwreck, of which the débris are friendship, fame, and love.

Superstition attaches to this life, and religion to the next; superstition is allied to fatality, and religion to virtue; it is from the vivacity of earthly desires that we become superstitious, and it is, on the contrary, by the sacrifice of these same desires that we are religious.

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