Edmond de Goncourt Quotes
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If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.
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Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.
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A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
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Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.
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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.
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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.
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People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.
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Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.
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Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.
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The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals.
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Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.
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A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
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That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.
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As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.