Quotes from Edmond de Goncourt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

He] went on to say that during all those years he had done nothing at all, that all he had felt had been a need to live, to live actively, violently, noisily, a need to sing, to make music, to roam the woods, to drink a little too much and get involved in a brawl.

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.

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

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.

We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality in which we live, there are classes unworthy the notice of the author and the reader, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too commonplace in the terror they inspire.

She was, so to speak, an impersonal creature, because of her great heart; a woman who did not belong to herself: God seemed to have made her only to give her to others.

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.

What is a vice? Merely a taste you do not share.

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

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.