Jules de Goncourt

Books by Jules de Goncourt

Germinie Lacerteux
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La femme au dix-huitieme siecle
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Gavarni : l'homme et l'oeuvre
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Quotes by Jules de Goncourt

After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.
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After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.
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Antiquity was perhaps created to provide professors with their bread and butter.
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The real connoisseurs in art are those who make people accept as beautiful something everybody used to consider ugly, by revealing and resuscitating the beauty in it.
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There are two infinities in this world: God up above, and down below, human baseness.
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History is a novel which did take place; a novel is history that could take place.
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There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.
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Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.
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That ephemeral sheet of paper, the newspaper, is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.
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Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity
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A human being sheds its leaves like a tree. Sickness prunes it down; and it no longer offers the same silhouette to the eyes which loved it, to the people to whom it afforded shade and comfort.
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Time cures one of everything-even of living.
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When incredulity becomes a faith, it is less rational than a religion.
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If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion.
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Only the woman of the world is a woman; the rest are females.
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