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
Unhappy love freezes all our affections: our own souls grow inexplicable to us. More than we gained while we were happy we lose by the reverse.
The mind's pleasures are made to calm the tempests of the heart.
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.
Love, supreme power of the heart, mysterious enthusiasm that encloses in itself all poetry, all heroism, all religion!
Beauty is one in the universe, and, whatever form it assumes, it always arouses a religious feeling in the hearts of mankind.
In matters of the heart, nothing is true except the improbable.
Love is the emplem of eternity; it confounds all notions of time; effaces all memory of begining, all fear of an end.
We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love
Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation, the source of strength is one's self. When one prays, he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.
Wit consists in knowing the resemblance of things that differ, and the difference of things that are alike.
When a noble life has prepared for old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.
[Moralistic] novels are at the same disadvantage as teachers: children never believe them, because they make everything that happens relate to the lesson at hand.
How true it is that, sooner or later, the' most rebellious must bow beneath the yoke of misfortune!