Quotes from Madame de Stael

What is love, if it can calculate and provide against its own decay?

In matters of the heart, nothing is true except the improbable.

The people are as severe toward the clergy as toward women; they want to see absolute devotion to duty from both.

The entire social order ... is arrayed against a woman who wants to rise to a man's reputation.

The more I see of men the more I like dogs.

One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.

The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.

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

Wit consists in knowing the resemblance of things which differ and the difference of things which are alike.

No nation has the right to bring about a revolution, even though such a change may be most urgently needed, if the price is the blood of one single innocent individual.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

Speech happens to not be his language.

The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals.

To be totally understanding makes one very indulgent.

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.

Men have made of fortune an all-powerful goddess, in order that she may be made responsible for all their blunder's.

Love which is only an episode in the life of men, is the entire history of the life of women.

I am glad that I am not a man, for then I should have to marry a woman.

Love is the history of a woman's life; it is an episode in man's. [Fr., L'amour est l'histoire de la vie des femmes; c'est un episode dans celle des hommes.]

[To Bonaparte, when asked why she meddled in politics:] Sire, when women have their heads cut off, it is but just they should know the reason.

When women oppose themselves to the projects and ambition of men, they excite their lively resentment; if in their youth they meddle with political intrigues, their modesty must suffer.

When men do wrong, it is out of hardness; when women do wrong, it is out of weakness.

The greater part of what women write about women is mere sycophancy to man.

women have no existence except in love; the history of their life begins and ends with love!