Edmond de Goncourt Men Quotations

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.

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

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

One of the proud joys of the man of letters --if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.

Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.

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.