Edmond de Goncourt

Notable Quotes



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.

From Edmond de Goncourt

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

From Edmond de Goncourt

Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.

From Edmond de Goncourt

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

From Edmond de Goncourt

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

From Edmond de Goncourt

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

From Edmond de Goncourt

Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.

From Edmond de Goncourt

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

From Edmond de Goncourt

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

From Edmond de Goncourt

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

From Edmond de Goncourt

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