Madame de Stael
Madame de Stael
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, commonly known as Madame de Staël, was a French woman of letters of Swiss origin whose lifetime overlapped with the events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. She was one of Napoleon's principal opponents. Celebrated for her conversational eloquence, she participated actively in the political and intellectual life of her times. Her works, both critical and fictional, made their mark on the history of European Romanticism...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth22 April 1766
CountryFrance
We understand death only after it has placed its hands on someone we love.
The pursuit of politics is religion, morality, and poetry all in one.
Love which is only an episode in the life of men, is the entire history of the life of women.
Love is above the laws, above the opinion of men; it is the truth, the flame, the pure element, the primary idea of the moral world.
Morality must guide calculation, and calculation must guide politics.
What matters in a character is not whether one holds this or that opinion: what matters is how proudly one upholds it.
Divine Wisdom, intending to detain us some time on earth, has done well to cover with a veil the prospect of the life to come; for if our sight could clearly distinguish the opposite bank, who would remain on this tempestuous coast of time?
Purity of mind and conduct is the first glory of a woman.
That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.
Men do not change, they unmask themselves.
A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.
Love is admiring with the heart. And admiring is loving with the mind.
The mind may be exhausted, but the language of the heart is inexhaustible.
Have you not observed that faith is generally strongest in those whose character may be called the weakest?