Edmond de Goncourt Quotes

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

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.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are. The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

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.

One of the proud joys of the man of letters - if that man of letters is an artist - is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.

Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.

Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.

She is unable to dream, think or love. In a woman, poetry never comes naturally, but always as the result of education. Only the woman of the world is a woman; the rest are simply females.

Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person, and as such is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds? There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.

I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

Princes enjoy themselves like children in the company of ordinary human beings.

Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.