Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve Quotes

#1. Since it is necessary to have enemies, let us endeavour to have those who do us honour.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#2. Despair itself if it goes on long enough, can become a kind of sanctuary in which one settles down and feels at ease.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#3. Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#4. The greatest of all French critics, and possibly the greatest European critic since Aristotle .

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#5. Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the first-raters.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#6. A philosophical thought has probably not attained all its sharpness and all its illumination until it is expressed in French

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#7. Tell me who loves, who admires you, and I will tell you who you are.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#8. I have always thought that if we began for one moment to say what we thought, society would collapse.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#9. I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#10. There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#11. What signifies the ladder, provided one rise and attain the end?

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#12. Nature wants us to enjoy life to the full and die without giving it a second thought; Christianity wants the opposite.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#13. The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three [Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden and George Saintsbury], the greatest critic that ever lived - not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#14. Most celebrated men live in a condition of prostitution.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#15. With everyone born human, a poet - an artist - is born, who dies young and who is survived by an adult.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#16. For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#17. In most men there exists a poet who died young, whom the man survived.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#18. If you want to succeed, limit yourself.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#19. If I had a device, it would be the true, the true only, leaving the beautiful and the good to settle matters afterwards as best they could.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve