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.

— Edmond de Goncourt

Edmond de Goncourt Quotes

There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.

— Edmond de Goncourt

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

— Edmond de Goncourt

People don’t like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

— Edmond de Goncourt

There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.

— Edmond de Goncourt

Laughter is the mind’s intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.

— Edmond de Goncourt

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

— Edmond de Goncourt

About Stories

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

— Edmond de Goncourt

Any man who does not see everything in terms of self, that is to say who wants to be something in respect of other men, to do good to them or simply give them something to do, is unhappy, disconsolate, and accursed.

— Edmond de Goncourt

The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

— Edmond de Goncourt

Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.

— Edmond de Goncourt

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

— Edmond de Goncourt

I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.

— Edmond de Goncourt

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

— Edmond de Goncourt

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

— Edmond de Goncourt

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

— Edmond de Goncourt

Princes enjoy themselves like children in the company of ordinary human beings.

— Edmond de Goncourt

Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.

— Edmond de Goncourt

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

— Edmond de Goncourt

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.

— Edmond de Goncourt

She is unable to dream, think or love. In a woman, poetry never comes naturally, but always as the result of education. Only the woman of the world is a woman; the rest are simply females.

— Edmond de Goncourt

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