Madame de Stael Quotes - Page 2

It is difficult to grow old gracefully.

It is not enough to forgive; one must forget.

The memories which come to us through music are not accompanied by any regrets; for a moment music gives us back the pleasures it retraces, and we feel them again rather than recollect them.

The mind may be exhausted, but the language of the heart is inexhaustible.

Life often seems like a long shipwreck of which the debris are friendship, glory, and love. - The shores of existence are strewn with them.

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

Ought not every woman, like every man, to follow the bent of her own talents?

The more we know the better we forgive. Whoever feels deeply, feels for all who live.

A voyage without companionship, that is to say without conversation, is one of the saddest pleasures of life.

The world is the work of a single thought, expressed in a thousand different ways.

Have you not observed that faith is generally strongest in those whose character may be called the weakest?

Divine Wisdom, intending to detain us some time on earth, has done well to cover with a veil the prospect of the life to come; for if our sight could clearly distinguish the opposite bank, who would remain on this tempestuous coast of time?

Beauty is one in the universe, and, whatever form it assumes, it always arouses a religious feeling in the hearts of mankind.

Who understands much, forgives much.

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

The success of any man with any woman is apt to displease even his best friends.

Goethe has made a remark upon the perfectability of the human mind, which is full of sagacity: It is always advancing, but in a spiral line.

Exile: A tomb in which you can get mail.

Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time.

Nature, who permits no two leaves to be exactly alike, has given a still greater diversity to human minds. Imitation, then, is a double murder; for it deprives both copy and original of their primitive existence.

The entire social order ... is arrayed against a woman who wants to rise to a man's reputation.

Love is the whole history of a woman's life, it is but an episode in a man's.

intellect is a sin that must be atoned for by leading exactly the life of those who have none.

When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.

The mind's pleasures are made to calm the tempests of the heart.