Hippolyte Taine
Hippolyte Taine was a French philosopher, historian, literary critic, and art historian, working in the nineteenth century across several disciplines and writing throughout in the French language.
Born on 21 April 1828 in Vouziers, Taine was educated at the Lycée Condorcet and subsequently at the École Normale Supérieure. These years of formation preceded a career that placed him, as writer and thinker, within the movement of positivism.
Taine worked across philosophy, literary criticism, history, and art history, producing writing that moved between those fields with consistency. His Philosophie de l'art stands among his notable works. Recognition came in the form of two significant honours: he was appointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour, and the University of Oxford awarded him an honorary doctorate, an acknowledgement that extended his reputation beyond France.
He died on 5 March 1893 in Paris, on the rue Cassette. His association with positivism, and his sustained engagement with art history and literary criticism, gave his body of work its defining character.
Quotes by Hippolyte Taine
There are four varieties in society – the lovers, the ambitious, observers, and fools. The fools are the happiest.
I've met many thinkers and many cats, but the wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
Amid this vast and overwhelming space and in these boundless solar archipelagoes, how small is our own sphere, and the earth, what a grain of sand!
We study ourselves three weeks, we love each other three months, we squabble three years, we tolerate each other thirty years, and then the children start all over again.
There are four varieties in society — the lovers, the ambitious, observers, and fools. The fools are the happiest.
His tongue is by turns a sponge, a brush, a comb. He cleans himself, he smooths himself, he knows what is proper.
There are four types of men in the world: lovers, opportunists, lookers-on, and imbeciles. The happiest are the imbeciles.
The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.
A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.
