Edmond de Goncourt
Edmond de Goncourt
Edmond de Goncourt, born Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt, was a French writer, literary critic, art critic, book publisher and the founder of the Académie Goncourt...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth26 May 1822
CountryFrance
years civilization world
Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.
betrayal men mind
Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.
war missing society
I feel sure that coups d'état would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.
love life sad
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.
stars men poetry
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
atheist if-there-is-a-god religion
If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.
art stupid museums
Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.
memories book men
One of the proud joys of the man of letters --if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.
art museums world
A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
beauty art eye
There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.
simple civilization fairy-stories
People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.
safe moral painting
As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.
health men sickness
Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.
firsts facts matter
The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.