Madame de Stael Quotes - Page 4

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.

Love, supreme power of the heart, mysterious enthusiasm that encloses in itself all poetry, all heroism, all religion!

I do not want an echo of myself from my children. I do not want to hear from them merely the reverberation of my own voice.

Anyone who can see as far as tomorrow in politics arouses the wrath of people who can see no farther than today.

The people are as severe toward the clergy as toward women; they want to see absolute devotion to duty from both.

O Earth! All bathed with blood and tears, yet never, Hast thou ceased putting forth thy fruit and flowers.

Thought can never be compared with action, but when it awakens in us the image of truth.

Only the refined and delicate pleasures that spring from research and education can build up barriers between different ranks.

Enthusiasm gives life to what is invisible; and interest to what has no immediate action on our comfort in this world.

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.

One must, so long as there is any life left, back up the character of one's life.

Sow good services: sweet remembrances will grow from them.

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

Tombs decked by the arts can scarcely represent death as a formidable enemy; we do not, indeed, like the ancients, carve sports and dances in the sarcophagus, but thought is diverted from the bier by works that tell of immortality, even from the altar of death.

Life teaches much, but to all thinking persons it brings ever closer the will of God - not because their faculties decline, but on the contrary, because they increase.

When women oppose themselves to the projects and ambition of men, they excite their lively resentment; if in their youth they meddle with political intrigues, their modesty must suffer.

If one hour's work is enough to govern France, four minutes is all that is needed for Italy. There is no nation more easily frightened; even its poetic imagination predisposes it to fear, and they look upon power as on an image that fills them with terror.

Genius inspires this thirst for fame: there is no blessing undesired by those to whom Heaven gave the means of winning it.

I never was able to believe in the existence of next year except as in a metaphysical notion.

Why shouldn't man be as angry about not having always been alive as about having to stop being alive?

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

Where no interest is takes in science, literature and liberal pursuits, mere facts and insignificant criticisms necessarily become the themes of discourse; and minds, strangers alike to activity and meditation, become so limited as to render all intercourse with them at once tasteless and oppressive.

No nation has the right to bring about a revolution, even though such a change may be most urgently needed, if the price is the blood of one single innocent individual.

A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.