Edmond De Goncourt Quotes

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

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

I feel sure that coups d'état would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.

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

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.

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

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.

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

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.

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

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.

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

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.