Hippolyte Taine Quotes

15 quotes in 213 categories

• There are four types of men in the world: lovers, opportunists, lookers-on, and imbeciles. The happiest are the imbeciles.
• I've met many thinkers and many cats, but the wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
• His tongue is by turns a sponge, a brush, a comb. He cleans himself, he smooths himself, he knows what is proper.
• For thirty centuries, from her sacred seat the cat looked down, and crouching at her feet, beheld the race of conquering Pharaohs kneel.
• The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of…
• In the stormy current of life characters are weights or floats which at one time make us glide along the bottom, and at another maintain…
• After the collection of facts, the search for causes.
• 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…
• The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.
• History is nothing but a problem of mechanics applied to psychology.
• There are four varieties in society — the lovers, the ambitious, observers, and fools. The fools are the happiest.
• 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…
• Man may be considered as a superior species of animal that produces philosophies and poems in about the same way a silkworm produces their cocoons…
• I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.

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