Edmond de Goncourt

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

“Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.”

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

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

“History is a novel that has been lived.”

“Jealousy is the dupe of illusion.”

“True charity is the desire to be useful to others without thought of recompense.”

“The chains of marriage are so heavy that it takes two to bear them, sometimes three.”

“The drawing shows me at a glance what would be spread over ten pages in a book.”

“The first quality of a book is to be readable.”

“There are no beautiful thoughts without beautiful forms, and conversely.”

“To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion.”

“The beautiful is what your servant instinctively finds ugly.”

“Reading is a pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like a sin.”

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

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

“Genius is the talent of a man who is dead.”

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

“The chains of marriage are so heavy that it takes two to bear them, sometimes three.”

“To be a classic, a book must be slightly boring.”