Hippolyte Taine Quotes

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

Hippolyte Taine

#2. Your God wants you to be fulfilled - to be happy.

Michael Hutchison

#3. 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

#4. No words and I knew with certainty that Bangley had killed his old man.

Peter Heller

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

Hippolyte Taine

#6. Find me a man who's interesting enough to have dinner with and I'll be happy.

Lauren Bacall

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

Hippolyte Taine

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

Hippolyte Taine

#9. 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

#10. Most important, though, I had to wait until I found the perfect traveling/eating/drinking/napping companion. And I did finally find him, two years ago - my Brazilian-born, French-speaking, wine-worshipping, tripe-consuming, uncomplaining traveler of a sweetheart.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#11. This is such music to my ears. James Carville advocating a tax cut to stimulate the economy.

Mary Matalin

#12. 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

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

Hippolyte Taine

#14. It is a pity that we cannot persuade all ministers to be men, for it is hard to see how other was they can be truly men of God.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

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

Hippolyte Taine

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

Hippolyte Taine

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

Hippolyte Taine

#22. We've gone from the image of India as land of fakirs lying on beds of nails, and snake charmers with the Indian rope trick, to the image of India as a land of mathematical geniuses, computer wizards, software gurus.

Shashi Tharoor

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

Hippolyte Taine

#24. Because it means that much to me, I'm gonna handle this with care. You just gotta believe me.

Kristen Ashley

#25. 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

#26. Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed? You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps." We

David Mitchell

#27. I don't think we ever get away from the fear of labels and being different. It's human nature to want to be part of a community. That's why excommunication and solitary confinement are such brutal forms of punishment.

Matte Bach

#28. 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