Anne Louise Germaine de Staël Quotes

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I believe that happiness consists in having a destiny in keeping with our abilities. Our desires are things of the moment, often harmful even to ourselves; but our abilities are permanent, and their demands never cease.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
The most beautiful landscapes in the world, if they evoke no memory, if they bear no trace of a remarkable event, are uninteresting compared to historic landscapes.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
The greatest happiness is to transform one's feelings into action.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
There is not enough interest in life to spread over twenty-four hours when one can't sleep.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
The sight of such a monument is like continual and stationary music, which one hears for one's good as one approaches it.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Frankness consists in always telling the truth, but not always all the truth.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
I am glad that I am not a man, for then I should have to marry a woman.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Beauty is one in the universe, and, whatever form it assumes, it always arouses a religious feeling in the hearts of mankind.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
In matters of the heart, nothing is true except the improbable.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Why shouldn't man be as angry about not having always been alive as about having to stop being alive?

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
The memories which come to us through music are not accompanied by any regrets. For a moment, music gives us back the pleasures it retraces, and we feel them again rather than recollect them.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Morality and freedom are the only bases of the happiness and dignity of the human race.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
We always cut our poetical theories to suit our talent...

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Love, that is but an episode in the life of man, is the entire story of the life of woman.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
The face of a woman is always a help or a hindrance in her life story, whatever the strength or range of her mind, however important the things which concern her. Men have wanted it to be this way.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
The more I see of other countries, the more I love my own.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Women have no existence except in love; the history of their life begins and ends with love!

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Liberty is the only idea which circulates with the human blood, in all ages, in all countries, and in all literature—liberty that is, and what cannot be separated from liberty, a love of country.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
I would gladly give half of the wit with which I am credited for half of the beauty you possess.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
[Ridicule] laughs at all those who see the earnestness of life and who still believe in true feelings and in serious thought... It soils the hope of youth. Only shameless vice is above its reach.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Between God and love, I recognize no mediator but my conscience.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
If one hour's work is enough to govern France, four minutes is all that is needed for Italy. There is no nation more easily frightened; even its poetic imagination predisposes it to fear, and they look upon power as on an image that fills them with terror.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Pretty women are like sovereigns: one flatters them only through interest.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
There is no arena in which vanity displays itself under such a variety of forms as in conversation.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
The rules are only barriers to keep children from falling.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Twenty years in the life of a man is sometimes a severe lesson.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
New doctrines ever displease the old. They like to fancy that the world has been losing wisdom, instead of gaining it, since they were young.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
A voyage without companionship, that is to say without conversation, is one of the saddest pleasures of life.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
No nation has the right to bring about a revolution, even though such a change may be most urgently needed, if the price is the blood of one single innocent individual.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
A perfect piece of architecture kindles that aimless reverie, which bears the soul we know not whither.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël