"La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n’est que le prestige d’un moment; l’œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme." <i>("The beauty t… - George Sand

La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n’est que le prestige d’un moment; l’œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme.

The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes," she continued, "is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.

Criticism is far too acute; that is what will cause its death. It never passes judgment ingenuously. It looks for noon at four o’clock, as the old women say, and must cause much suffering to artists who care more for its decrees than they ought to do.

No place is ugly to those who understand the virtues and sweetness of everything that God has made.

MEPHISTOPHELES: What dreary, stale employment to keep watch on a philosopher! [...] These logicians are distrustful souls. One works like a spider around their cold brains to catch them in the web of dialectic, but the result is that they kick and catch the devil in threads of their own making. They use chicanery to resist the master who taught it to them! This one uses demonstrative reason to arrive at faith, and what ruins others saves him from my claws. You are a mystical pedant who gives me more pain than did your ancestor, Faust. [...] Behold, philosophers who want at one and the same time to understand and to feel. If we let them get away with it, man will slip between our fingers quickly enough. Hola, my masters! Believe and be absurd, we agree to that; but don’t complicate it by trying both to believe and to be wise.