Edmond De Goncourt Quotes

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

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

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

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.

Any man who does not see everything in terms of self, that is to say who wants to be something in respect of other men, to do good to them or simply give them something to do, is unhappy, disconsolate, and accursed.

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.

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

Then Montesquiou was mentioned, and somebody described his first love-affair, a Baudelairean love-affair with a female ventriloquist who, while Montesquiou was straining to achieve his climax, would imitate the drunken voice of a pimp, threatening the aristocratic client.

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.

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

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Baudelaire had supper at the table next to ours. He was without a cravat, his shirt open at the neck and his head shaved, just as if he were to be guillotined. A single affectation: his little hands washed and cared for, the nails kept scrupulously clean. The face of a maniac, a voice that cuts like a knife, and a precise elocution that tries to copy Saint-Just and succeeds.