Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve famous quotes

07-20-2025

With everyone born human, a poet - an artist - is born, who dies young and who is survived by an adult.
-- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#Wise #Artist #Adults
Most celebrated men live in a condition of prostitution.
-- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#Men #Fame #Prostitution
Despair itself if it goes on long enough, can become a kind of sanctuary in which one settles down and feels at ease.
-- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#Long #Despair #Goes On
If I had a device, it would be the true, the true only, leaving the beautiful and the good to settle matters afterwards as best they could.
-- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#Beautiful #Truth #Leaving
Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the first-raters.
-- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#Reading #People #Rooms
The greatest of all French critics, and possibly the greatest European critic since Aristotle .
-- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#Critics
The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three [Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden and George Saintsbury], the greatest critic that ever lived - not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve.
-- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#Teacher #Three #Wonderful
A philosophical thought has probably not attained all its sharpness and all its illumination until it is expressed in French
-- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#Philosophical #Illumination #Sharpness
Since it is necessary to have enemies, let us endeavour to have those who do us honour.
-- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#Enemy #Endeavour #Honour
In most men there exists a poet who died young, whom the man survived.
-- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#Men #Poetry #He Man
I have always thought that if we began for one moment to say what we thought, society would collapse.
-- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#Honesty #Moments #Collapse
Nature wants us to enjoy life to the full and die without giving it a second thought; Christianity wants the opposite.
-- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#Opposites #Giving #Enjoy Life
There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.
-- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#People #Clock #Certain
If you want to succeed, limit yourself.
-- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#Want #Limits #Succeed

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