Émile de Girardin

Émile de Girardin (22 June 1802 – 27 April 1881) was a French journalist, publisher and politician. He was the most successful and flamboyant French journalist of the era, presenting himself as a promoter of mass education through mass journalism.

Quotes

A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedness (1902)

Edited by J. de Finod. New York: D. Appleton and Co.

• At the age when the faculties droop, when stern experience has destroyed all sweet illusions, man may seek solitude; but, at twenty, the affections which he is compelled to repress are a tomb in which he buries himself alive.
  • p. 19

• Instruction is to the proletary what liberty is to the slave: the latter emancipates the body, the former emancipates the intelligence.
  • p. 27

• The power of words is immense. A well-chosen word has often sufficed to stop a flying army, to change defeat into victory, and to save an empire.
  • p. 31

• Whenever the good done to us does not touch and penetrate the heart, it wounds and irritates our vanity.
  • p. 46

• No faith has triumphed without its martyrs.
  • p. 58

• Illusions ruin all those whom they blind.
  • p. 65

• Utopia! such is the name with which ignorance, folly, and incredulity have always characterized the great conceptions, discoveries, enterprises, and ideas which have illustrated the ages, and marked eras in human progress.
  • p. 73

• Modesty is the chastity of merit, the virginity of noble souls.
  • p. 77

• Servility is to devotion what hypocrisy is to virtue.
  • p. 83

• Without the ideal, this inexhaustible source of all progress, what would man be? and what would society be?
  • p. 98

• There is more poverty in the human heart than misery in life.
  • p. 155

• Which is the best religion? The most tolerant.
  • p. 161

• The woman who loves us is only a woman, but the woman we love is a celestial being whose defects disappear under the prism through which we see her.
  • p. 182

• A woman by whom we are loved is a vanity; a woman whom we love is a religion.
  • p. 184

• Esteem is the strongest of all sympathies.
  • p. 211