Hippolyte Taine Quotes

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The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of quantities; they must be treated with precision. I have never had more satisfaction than in proving this in the realms of art, politics and history.

Hippolyte Taine

Man, like everything else that lives, changes with the air that sustains him.

Hippolyte Taine

In the stormy current of life characters are weights or floats which at one time make us glide along the bottom, and at another maintain us on the surface.

Hippolyte Taine

The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.

Hippolyte Taine

Amid this vast and overwhelming space and in these boundless solar archipelagoes, how small is our own sphere, and the earth, what a grain of sand!

Hippolyte Taine

Kindly politeness is the slow fruit of advanced reflection; it is a sort of humanity and kindliness applied to small acts and every day discourse: it bids man soften towards others, and forget himself for the sake of others: it constrains genuine nature, which is selfish and gross.

Hippolyte Taine

To have a true idea of man or of life, one must have stood himself on the brink of suicide, or on the door-sill of insanity, at least once.

Hippolyte Taine

Hippolyte Taine

Hippolyte Taine

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Born: April 21, 1828

Died: March 5, 1893 (aged 64)

Bio: Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French critic and historian. He was the chief theoretical influence of French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism.

Known for:

History of English literature (1872)
Notes on England
The Ancient Regime (1876)
Les origines de la France contemporaine (1855)
The Philosophy of Art (1870)

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