Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël (April 22, 1766 – July 14, 1817), commonly known as Madame de Staël, 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.

Sourced

• 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)

• Madame de Staël thought it was pride in man. to endeavour to penetrate the secret of the universe; and speaking of the higher metaphysics she said: "I prefer the Lord's Prayer to it all."
  • Sketch of the Life, Character, and Writings of Baroness de Staël-Holstein (1820) by Albertine-Adrienne Necker de Saussure, p. 349
    • often quoted as "I desire no other evidence of the truth of Christianity than the Lord's Prayer."

• We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us.
  • Quoted in Portraits de Femmes (1832-48) by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

• Sow good services: sweet remembrances will grow from them.
  • Quoted in A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedness (1880) collected and translated by J. D. Finod, p. 138

• Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.
  • Quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts : Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors, Both Ancient and Modern (1891) edited by Tryon Edwards. p. 502

• Men do not change; they unmask themselves.
  • Quoted in Invasion of the Party Snatchers : How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP (2008) by Victor Gold

Corinne (1807)

• Frivolity, under whatever form it appears, deprives attention of its power, thought of its originality, and sentiment of its depth.
  • bk. 1, ch. 3

• Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.
  • bk. 7, ch. 1

• Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end…
  • bk. 8, ch. 2

• A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.
  • bk. 10, ch. 5

• O Earth! all bathed with blood and tears, yet never
  Hast thou ceased putting forth thy fruit and flowers.
  • bk. 13, ch. 4

• To be totally understanding makes one very indulgent.
  • bk. 18, ch. 5

De l’Allemagne (Germany) (1813)

• Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.
  • Pt. 2, ch. 8.

• Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike.
  • Pt. 3, ch. 8.

• 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.
  • Pt. 3. ch. 13.

• The sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it; enthusiasm signifies God in us.
  • Pt. 4. ch. 10.

Disputed

• The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.
  • Sometimes published as an anonymous saying, this was attributed to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in Is It Nothing To You? Social Purity, A Grave Moral Question (1884) by Henry Rowley, p. 88; to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in "Would You Be Re-elected", Munsey's Magazine (April 1909), p. 769; and to de Staël in Aspects of Western Civilization : Problems and Sources in History (2003), p. 294

Misattributed

• The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals.
  • Probably a paraphrase of this line from De l’Allemagne, Pt. 3. ch. 10. "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." Not know from Goethe's works.