Anne Louise Germaine de Staël Quotes

114 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
The more we know, the better we forgive;
Whoe'er feels deeply, feels for all who live.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
When men do wrong, it is out of hardness; when women do wrong, it is out of weakness.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
The study of history, it seems to me, leads to the conviction that all important events tend toward the same end — the civilization of mankind.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Superstition attaches to this life, and religion to the next; superstition is allied to fatality, and religion to virtue; it is from the vivacity of earthly desires that we become superstitious, and it is, on the contrary, by the sacrifice of these same desires that we are religious.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Life resembles Gobelin tapestry; you do not see the canvass on the right side; but when you turn it, the threads are visible.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
There is in hypocrisy as much folly as vice: it is as easy to be honest as to appear so.

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
[The Germans] so easily confuse obstinacy with energy, and rudeness with firmness.

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

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
[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
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
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
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
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
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
The study of mathematics, habituating us to certainty, inflames us against all opinions in contradiction with our own, &c.

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

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