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
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
Love is the history of a woman's life; it is an episode in man's. [Fr., L'amour est l'histoire de la vie des femmes; c'est un episode dans celle des hommes.]
Love is the symbol of eternity.
Life often seems like a long shipwreck of which the debris are friendship, glory, and love. - The shores of existence are strewn with them.
Love is the whole history of a woman's life, it is but an episode in a man's.
When at eve, at the bounding of the landscape, the heavens appear to recline so slowly on the earth, imagination pictures beyond the horizon an asylum of hope, - a native land of love; and nature seems silently to repeat that man is immortal.
Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.
What is love, if it can calculate and provide against its own decay?
There is no reality on this earth except religion and the power of love; all the rest is even more fugitive than life itself.
Between God and love, I recognize no mediator but my conscience ...
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.
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.