Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

“The evil arising from mental improvement can be corrected only by a still further progress in that very improvement. Either morality is a fable, or the more enlightened we are, the more attached to it we become.”

“If we would succeed in works of the imagination, we must offer a mild morality in the midst of rigid manners; but where the manners are corrupt, we must consistently hold up to view an austere morality.”

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

“It seems to me that life's circumstances, being ephemeral, teach us less about durable truths than the fictions based on those truths; and that the best lessons of delicacy and self-respect are to be found in novels where the feelings are so naturally portrayed that you fancy you are witnessing real life as you read.”

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

“Superstition attaches to this life, and religion to the next; superstition is allied to fatality, and religion to virtue; it is from the vivacity of earthly desires that we become superstitious, and it is, on the contrary, by the sacrifice of these same desires that we are religious.”

“Life often seems like a long shipwreck, of which the débris are friendship, fame, and love.”

“Madame de Staël thought it was pride in mankind 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."”

“Sow good services: sweet remembrances will grow from them.”

“Men do not change; they unmask themselves.”

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

“When once enthusiasm has been turned into ridicule, everything is undone except money and power.”

“You do not reach the sublime by degrees; the distance between it and the merely beautiful is infinite.”

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

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

“Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end: we fancy that we have always possessed what we love, so difficult is it to imagine how we could have lived without it.”

“Beauty is one in the universe, and, whatever form it assumes, it always arouses a religious feeling in the hearts of mankind.”

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

“Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness, and baseness.”

“A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.”

“O Earth! all bathed with blood and tears, yet never Hast thou ceased putting forth thy fruit and flowers.”

“Ought not every woman, like every man, to follow the bent of her own talents?”

“Be happy, but be so by piety.”

“Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.”

“There is perhaps too much freedom in Protestantism to satisfy a certain religious austerity, which may seize upon the man who is overwhelmed by great misfortunes; sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane.”

“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 sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it; enthusiasm signifies God in us.”