Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve Quotes
With everyone born human, a poet - an artist - is born, who dies young and who is survived by an adult.
Nature wants us to enjoy life to the full and die without giving it a second thought; Christianity wants the opposite.
Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.
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.
I have always thought that if we began for one moment to say what we thought, society would collapse.
Despair itself if it goes on long enough, can become a kind of sanctuary in which one settles down and feels at ease.
In most men there exists a poet who died young, whom the man survived.
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.
Since it is necessary to have enemies, let us endeavour to have those who do us honour.
A philosophical thought has probably not attained all its sharpness and all its illumination until it is expressed in French.
The greatest of all French critics, and possibly the greatest European critic since Aristotle .
