Quotes from Madame de Stael

Mystery such as is given of God is beyond the power of human penetration, yet not in opposition to it.

Frivolity, under whatever form it appears, deprives attention of its power, thought of its originality, and sentiment of its depth.

Prayer is the life of the soul.

Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation, the source of strength is one's self. When one prays, he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.

The pursuit of politics is religion, morality, and poetry all in one.

Let us then blend everything: love, religion, genius, with sunshine, perfume, music, and poetry.

There is no reality on this earth except religion and the power of love; all the rest is even more fugitive than life itself.

Goethe has made a remark upon the perfectability of the human mind, which is full of sagacity: It is always advancing, but in a spiral line.

When a noble life has prepared for old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

Society develops wit, but its contemplation alone forms genius.

One must, in one's life, make a choice between boredom and suffering.

A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.

The success of any man with any woman is apt to displease even his best friends.

Enthusiasm gives life to what is invisible; and interest to what has no immediate action on our comfort in this world.

How much past there is in a life, however brief it be.

We understand death only after it has placed its hands on someone we love.

To pray together, in whatever tongue or ritual, is the most tender brotherhood of hope and sympathy that man can contract in this life.

Self-love, so sensitive in its own cause, has rarely any sympathy to spare for others.

Life teaches much, but to all thinking persons it brings ever closer the will of God - not because their faculties decline, but on the contrary, because they increase.

intellect is a sin that must be atoned for by leading exactly the life of those who have none.

Life, for me, is living among my friends.

One must, so long as there is any life left, back up the character of one's life.

[Ridicule] laughs at all those who see the earnestness of life and who still believe in true feelings and in serious thought ... It soils the hope of youth. Only shameless vice is above its reach.