EDMOND DE GONCOURT

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

History is a fiction which actually happened; fiction is history which could have happened.

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

The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

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.