The real connoisseurs in art are those who make people accept as beautiful something everybody used to consider ugly, by revealing and resuscitating the… — Jules de Goncourt Copy Share Image
A human being sheds its leaves like a tree. Sickness prunes it down; and it no longer offers the same silhouette to the eyes… — Jules de Goncourt Copy Share Image
A sign of the times: there are no longer any chairs in the bookshops along the embankments. [Noël] France was the last bookseller who provided chairs where you could sit down and chat and waste a little time between sales. Nowadays books are bought standing. A request for a book and the naming of the price: that is the sort… — Jules de Goncourt Copy Share
Never speak of yourself to others; make them talk about themselves instead; therein lies the whole art of pleasing. Everybody knows it, and everyone… — Jules de Goncourt Copy Share Image
When incredulity becomes a faith, it is less rational than a religion. — Jules de Goncourt Copy Share Image
History is a novel which did take place; a novel is history that could take place. — Jules de Goncourt Copy Share Image
There are two infinities in this world: God up above, and down below, human baseness. — Jules de Goncourt Copy Share Image
There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures me as… — Jules de Goncourt Copy Share Image
After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific… — Jules de Goncourt Copy Share Image
Antiquity was perhaps created to provide professors with their bread and butter. — Jules de Goncourt Copy Share Image
