Hippolyte Quotes

Change a virtue in its circumstances find it becomes a vice; change a vice in its circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of a man is found concealed far below these moral badges. ~ 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

A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains. ~ Hippolyte Taine

Not long ago I was much amused by imagining - what if the fancy suddenly took me to kill some one, a dozen people at once, or to do some thing awful, something considered the most awful crime in the world - what a predicament my judges would be in, with my having only a fortnight to live, now that corporal punishment and torture is abolished. I should die comfortably in hospital, warm aad snug, with an attentive doctor, and very likely much more snug and comfortable than at home. I wonder that the idea doesn't strike people in my position, if only as a joke. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

It is not easy to live with another person, at least it is not easy for me. It makes me realize how selfish I am. It has not been easy for me to love another person either, though I am getting better at it. I can be gentle for as long as a month at a time now, before I become selfish again. I used to try to study what it meant to love someone. I would write down quotations from the works of famous writers, writers who did not interest me otherwise, like Hippolyte Taine or Alfred de Musset. For instance, Taine said that to love is to make one's goal the happiness of another person. I would try to apply this to my own situation. But if loving a person meant putting him before myself, how could I do that? There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn how to love a person while continuing to be selfish. I did not think I could manage the first two, but I thought I could learn how to be just unselfish enough to love someone at least part of the time. ~ Lydia Davis

There are four types of men in the world: lovers, opportunists, lookers-on, and imbeciles. The happiest are the imbeciles. ~ Hippolyte Taine

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

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

We study ourselves three weeks, we love each other three months, we squabble three years, we tolerate each other thirty years, and then the children start all over again. ~ Hippolyte Taine

There are four varieties in society - the lovers, the ambitious, observers, and fools. The fools are the happiest. ~ Hippolyte Taine

Prince Hippolyte, under pretense of helping, was in everyone's way. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Man may be considered as a superior species of animal that produces philosophies and poems in about the same way a silkworm produces their cocoons and bees their hives. ~ Hippolyte Taine