Goncourt Quotes

#1. 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.

Edmond De Goncourt

#2. 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.

Edmond De Goncourt

#3. Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.

Edmond De Goncourt

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

Edmond De Goncourt

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

Edmond De Goncourt

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

Edmond De Goncourt

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

Edmond De Goncourt

#8. There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures me as to our value: the boredom that afflicts us. It is the hall-mark of quality in modern men.

Jules De Goncourt

#9. 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.

Edmond De Goncourt

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

Edmond De Goncourt

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

Edmond De Goncourt

#12. Any man who does not see everything in terms of self, that is to say who wants to be something in respect of other men, to do good to them or simply give them something to do, is unhappy, disconsolate, and accursed.

Edmond De Goncourt

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

Edmond De Goncourt

#14. The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

Edmond De Goncourt

#15. 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.

Edmond De Goncourt

#16. Antiquity was perhaps created to provide professors with their bread and butter.

Jules De Goncourt

#17. That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.

Edmond De Goncourt

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

Edmond De Goncourt

#19. When incredulity becomes a faith, it is less rational than a religion.

Jules De Goncourt

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

Edmond De Goncourt

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

Edmond De Goncourt

#22. Only a woman of the world is a woman; the rest are females.

Jules De Goncourt

#23. The real connoisseurs in art are those who make people accept as beautiful something everybody used to consider ugly, by revealing and resuscitating the beauty in it.

Jules De Goncourt

#24. 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.

Edmond De Goncourt

#25. [He] went on to say that during all those years he had done nothing at all, that all he had felt had been a need to live, to live actively, violently, noisily, a need to sing, to make music, to roam the woods, to drink a little too much and get involved in a brawl.

Edmond De Goncourt

#26. A human being sheds its leaves like a tree. Sickness prunes it down; and it no longer offers the same silhouette to the eyes which loved it, to the people to whom it afforded shade and comfort.

Jules De Goncourt

#27. Never speak of yourself to others; make them talk about themselves instead; therein lies the whole art of pleasing. Everybody knows it, and everyone forgets it.

Jules De Goncourt

#28. Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

Edmond De Goncourt

#29. History is a novel which did take place; a novel is history that could take place.

Jules De Goncourt

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

Edmond De Goncourt

#31. Time cures one of everything-even of living.

Jules De Goncourt

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

Edmond De Goncourt

#33. There are two infinities in this world: God up above, and down below, human baseness.

Jules De Goncourt

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

Edmond De Goncourt

#35. Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

Edmond De Goncourt

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

Edmond De Goncourt