Jules de Goncourt

Only a woman of the world is a woman; the rest are females.

— Jules de Goncourt

The real connoisseurs in art are those who make people accept as beautiful something everybody used to consider ugly, by revealing and…

— Jules de Goncourt

A human being sheds its leaves like a tree. Sickness prunes it down; and it no longer offers the same silhouette to…

— Jules de Goncourt

A sign of the times: there are no longer any chairs in the bookshops along the embankments. [Noël] France was the last…

— Jules de Goncourt

Never speak of yourself to others; make them talk about themselves instead; therein lies the whole art of pleasing. Everybody knows it,…

— Jules de Goncourt

When incredulity becomes a faith, it is less rational than a religion.

— Jules de Goncourt

History is a novel which did take place; a novel is history that could take place.

— Jules de Goncourt

There are two infinities in this world: God up above, and down below, human baseness.

— Jules de Goncourt

Time cures one of everything-even of living.

— Jules de Goncourt

There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures…

— 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…

— Jules de Goncourt

Antiquity was perhaps created to provide professors with their bread and butter.

— Jules de Goncourt