Edmond de Goncourt Quotations

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.

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

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

One of the proud joys of the man of letters --if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.

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