Anne Louise Germaine de Staël Quotes

114 Sourced Quotes

Kindness and generosity... form the true morality of human actions.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Men have made of Fortune an all-powerful goddess, in order to be made responsible for all their blunders.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
In Italy, almost at every step, history and poetry add to the graces of nature, sweeten the memory of the past, and seem to preserve it in eternal youth.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Who understands much forgives much. To understand everything makes us very forgiving.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
'I told you how it would be.' Strange mode of comforting; but such is the satisfaction which vanity tastes at the expense of misfortune.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Life often seems but a long shipwreck, of which the débris are friendship, glory, and love: the shores of our existence are strewn with them.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
She wished all the faculties she did not share to be looked on as diseases.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
I shall be told, I know, that Mathematics render the attention peculiarly close (appliquee); but they do not habituate to collect, to appreciate, to concentrate; the attention they require is, so to speak, in a straight line; the human mind acts in mathematics as a spring tending in one uniform direction.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Nothing is less applicable to life than a mathematical argument.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
The study of mathematics, habituating us to certainty, inflames us against all opinions in contradiction with our own, &c.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
The mathematics lead us to lay out of account all that is not proved; while the primitive truths, those which sentiment and genius apprehend, are not susceptible of demonstration.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
There is always something in a man's success with a woman which is displeasing even to his best friends.
Variant translation: The success of any man, with any woman, is apt to displease even his best friends.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Many a man who has never been able to manage his own fortune, nor his wife, nor his children, has the stupidity to imagine himself capable of managing the affairs of a nation.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
It seems to me that life's circumstances, being ephemeral, teach us less about durable truths than the fictions based on those truths; and that the best lessons of delicacy and self-respect are to be found in novels where the feelings are so naturally portrayed that you fancy you are witnessing real life as you read.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
[Moralistic] novels are at the same disadvantage as teachers: children never believe them, because they make everything that happens relate to the lesson at hand.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
When once enthusiasm has been turned into ridicule, everything is undone except money and power.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
O Earth! all bathed with blood and tears, yet never
Hast thou ceased putting forth thy fruit and flowers.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Of all human sentiments, enthusiasm creates the most happiness; it is the only sentiment in fact which gives real happiness, the only sentiment which can help us to bear our human destiny in any situation in which we may find ourselves.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
[The Germans] so easily confuse obstinacy with energy, and rudeness with firmness.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
One must, in one's life, make a choice between boredom and suffering.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
She liked to make others' lives as drab as possible, perhaps so as not to feel too much regret at the dissolution of her own.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
The people are as severe toward the clergy as toward women; they want to see absolute devotion to duty from both.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
The more we know, the better we forgive;
Whoe'er feels deeply, feels for all who live.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël