Hippolyte Taine Quotes

#1. I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.

Hippolyte Taine

#2. In the stormy current of life characters are weights or floats which at one time make us glide along the bottom, and at another maintain us on the surface.

Hippolyte Taine

#3. His tongue is by turns a sponge, a brush, a comb. He cleans himself, he smooths himself, he knows what is proper.

Hippolyte Taine

#4. There are four varieties in society - the lovers, the ambitious, observers, and fools. The fools are the happiest.

Hippolyte Taine

#5. A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.

Hippolyte Taine

#6. Amid this vast and overwhelming space and in these boundless solar archipelagoes, how small is our own sphere, and the earth, what a grain of sand!

Hippolyte Taine

#7. The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of quantities; they must be treated with precision. I have never had more satisfaction than in proving this in the realms of art, politics and history.

Hippolyte Taine

#8. There are four types of men in the world: lovers, opportunists, lookers-on, and imbeciles. The happiest are the imbeciles.

Hippolyte Taine

#9. Kindly politeness is the slow fruit of advanced reflection; it is a sort of humanity and kindliness applied to small acts and every day discourse: it bids man soften towards others, and forget himself for the sake of others: it constrains genuine nature, which is selfish and gross.

Hippolyte Taine

#10. For thirty centuries, from her sacred seat the cat looked down, and crouching at her feet, beheld the race of conquering Pharaohs kneel.

Hippolyte Taine

#11. We study ourselves three weeks, we love each other three months, we squabble three years, we tolerate each other thirty years, and then the children start all over again.

Hippolyte Taine

#12. Change a virtue in its circumstances find it becomes a vice; change a vice in its circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of a man is found concealed far below these moral badges.

Hippolyte Taine

#13. I wish to reproduce things as they are or as they would be even if I myself did not exist.

Hippolyte Taine

#14. History is nothing but a problem of mechanics applied to psychology.

Hippolyte Taine

#15. After the collection of facts, the search for causes.

Hippolyte Taine

#16. The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.

Hippolyte Taine

#17. Man may be considered as a superior species of animal that produces philosophies and poems in about the same way a silkworm produces their cocoons and bees their hives.

Hippolyte Taine

#18. To have a true idea of man or of life, one must have stood himself on the brink of suicide, or on the door-sill of insanity, at least once.

Hippolyte Taine