36 Quotes by Edmond De Goncourt

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.

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.