Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
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Anne Louise Germaine de Staël (April 22, 1766 – July 14, 1817) was a French-speaking Swiss author living in Paris and abroad who determined literary tastes of Europe at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries.
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- Love is the whole history of a woman's life, it is an episode in a man's.
- De l'Influence des Passions (1796)
- A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.
- Delphine, epigraph (1802)
- Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.
- Corinne (1807) bk. 7, ch. 1
- To be totally understanding makes one very indulgent.
- Corinne (1807) bk. 18, ch. 5
- Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.
- De l’Allemagne (Germany), pt. 2, ch. 8 (1813)
- Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike.
- De l’Allemagne, pt. 3, ch. 8 (1813)
- 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.
- De l’Allemagne, pt. 3. ch. 13 (1813)
- The sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it; enthusiasm signifies God in us.
- De l’Allemagne, pt. 4. ch. 10 (1813)
- We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us.
- Quoted by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve in Portraits de Femmes (1832-48)
- Frivolity, under whatever form it appears, takes from attention its strength, from thought its originality, from feeling its earnestness.
- Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 255.
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- Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notions of time; effaces all memory of begining, all fear of an end.
- Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.
- Sow good services: sweet remembrances will grow from them.
- The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.
- Men do not change; they unmask themselves.
- The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals.
