Edmond de Goncourt Quotes

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

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Atheist, If There Is A God, Religion

  78 Copy quote

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

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Simple, Civilization, Fairy Stories

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• 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.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Love, Life, Sad

  265 Copy quote

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

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Art, Museums, World

  58 Copy quote

• A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Stars, Men, Poetry

  20 Copy quote

• Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Past, Novelists, Stories

  Edmond de Goncourt, Jules de Goncourt (1958). “The Goncourt journals, 1851-1870”

  12 Copy quote

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

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Art, Philosophy, Years

  11 Copy quote

• As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Art, Safe, Moral

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

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Two, Envy, Political

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• The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
  The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Men, Artist, Past

  11 Copy quote

• Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Despair, Faces, Infinity

  33 Copy quote

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

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Betrayal, Men, Mind

  8 Copy quote

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

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Beauty, Art, Eye

  Statement on February 17, 1859. "Pages from the Goncourt Journal". Book by Edmond de Goncourt, translated by Robert Baldick, p. 40, 1962.

  8 Copy quote

• Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Statistics, Firsts

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Memories, Book, Artist

  Statement on February 08, 1868. "Pages from the Goncourt Journal". Book by Edmond de Goncourt, translated by Robert Baldick, p. 135, 1962.

  9 Copy quote

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

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Laughter, Laughing, Mind

  8 Copy quote

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

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Novel, Could Have Been, Has Beens

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Dream, Women, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Honest, Individual, Crooked

  Statement on October 29, 1868. "Pages from the Goncourt Journal". Book by Edmond de Goncourt, translated by Robert Baldick, p. 141, 1962.

  9 Copy quote

• Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Health, Men, Sickness

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

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Art, Stupid, Museums

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Beauty, Art, Eye

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Temptation, Leaving, Sin

  4 Copy quote

• Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Genius, Talent, Persons

  4 Copy quote

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

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Children, Class, Ordinary

  5 Copy quote

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