Home > Author > Edmond de Goncourt
1 " Demander à la poésie du sentimentalisme ... ce n'est pas ça. Des mots rayonnants, des mots de lumière ... avec un rythme et une musique, voilà ce que c'est, la poésie. "
― Edmond de Goncourt , Pages from the Goncourt Journals
2 " If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion. "
― Edmond de Goncourt
3 " I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin. "
4 " A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world. "
5 " [He] went on to say that during all those years he had done nothing at all, that all he had felt had been a need to live, to live actively, violently, noisily, a need to sing, to make music, to roam the woods, to drink a little too much and get involved in a brawl. "
6 " Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence. "
7 " A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin. "
8 " Statistics is the main of all inaccurate studies "
9 " Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence. "
10 " History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been. "
11 " Baudelaire had supper at the table next to ours. He was without a cravat, his shirt open at the neck and his head shaved, just as if he were to be guillotined. A single affectation: his little hands washed and cared for, the nails kept scrupulously clean. The face of a maniac, a voice that cuts like a knife, and a precise elocution that tries to copy Saint-Just and succeeds. "
12 " She was, so to speak, an impersonal creature, because of her great heart; a woman who did not belong to herself: God seemed to have made her only to give her to others. "
― Edmond de Goncourt , Germinie Lacerteux
13 " Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization. "
14 " We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality in which we live, there are classes unworthy the notice of the author and the reader, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too commonplace in the terror they inspire. "
15 " Then Montesquiou was mentioned, and somebody described his first love-affair, a Baudelairean love-affair with a female ventriloquist who, while Montesquiou was straining to achieve his climax, would imitate the drunken voice of a pimp, threatening the aristocratic client. "
16 " What is a vice? Merely a taste you do not share. "
17 " how useless laws are, and how omnipotent morals are "
18 " We have forgotten how to sleep with a woman without any smarty-pantsness "
