Germaine de Staël Quotes

Understanding everything makes one very indulgent.

L'admiration pour le beau se rapporte toujours à la Divinité.

One must, in one's life, make a choice between boredom and suffering.

The admiration of the beautiful always has relation to the Divinity.

Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness, and baseness.

There is perhaps too much freedom in Protestantism to satisfy a certain religious austerity, which may seize upon the man who is overwhelmed by great misfortunes; sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane.

La voix de la conscience est si délicate, qu'il est facile d'étouffer; mais elle est si pure, qu'il est impossible de la méconnaître.

The sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it; enthusiasm signifies God in us.

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

When men do wrong, it is out of hardness; when women do wrong, it is out of weakness.

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.

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

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

Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end: we fancy that we have always possessed what we love, so difficult is it to imagine how we could have lived without it.

We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us.