Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Anne Louise Germaine de Stael (French Woman of Letters)

Madame de Staël (1766–1817,) pseudonym of Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baroness of Staël-Holstein, was a French writer and political theorist. She was at the heart of intellectual and literary life in the France of Revolution and Napoleon.

Born in Paris, de Staël was the only child of the financier and statesman Jacques Necker. In her adolescence, she attended her mother’s salon and wrote romantic comedies, tragedies, novels, essays, and the celebrated Lettres sur Rousseau (1789.)

Madame de Staël’s distinguished Parisian salon became the center of political discourse. As well as drawing and inspiring others in her salon, she wrote novels, plays, literary criticism, political essays, and poems and developed the ideas behind Romanticism.

Madame de Staël prepared for a political role through her Réflexions sur la paix intérieur (1795, ‘Reflections on Civil Peace.’) Her Influence des passions appeared in 1796. She published her famous Littérature et ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800; The Influence of Literature upon Society, 1812,) followed by the novel Delphine (1802.) She was regularly exiled from Paris—having fallen out with Napoleon, whom she opposed, Madame de Staël become a towering figure in the history of European ideas. She meet the German writers Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and August von Schlegel.

Madame de Staël’s other notable works are Corinne (1807) and De l’Allemagne (1813.) After she died, her children published her unfinished Considérations sur la Révolution franéaise (1818; Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, 1818,) the Dix années d’exil (1821; Ten Years’ Exile, 1821,) and her complete works (1820–21.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Anne Louise Germaine de Stael

Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation the source of strength is one’s self. When one prays, he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Prayer

The soul is a fire that darts its rays through all the senses; it is in this fire that existence consists; all the observations and all the efforts of philosophers ought to turn towards this ME, the centre and moving power of our sentiments and our ideas.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael

I desire no other evidence of the truth of Christianity, than the Lord’s prayer.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Prayer

Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Humor, Wit

A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Public opinion, Opinion

Life often seems like a long shipwreck of which the debris are friendship, glory, and love.—The shores of existence are strewn with them.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Life, Disappointment

There are only two distinct classes of people on this earth: those who espouse enthusiasm and those who despise it.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael

Enthusiasm signifies God in us.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Enthusiasm, Passion

We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Death

We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Love

The greater part of what women write about women is mere sycophancy to man.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Woman

Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Love, Eternity, Marriage

One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Religion, Boredom

I do not believe in ghosts, but I am awfully afraid of them.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Wisdom

To pray together, in whatever tongue or ritual, is the most tender brotherhood of hope and sympathy that man can contract in this life.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Prayer

Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Innocence

The greatest happiness is to transform one’s feelings into action.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Feelings

The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Difficulty, Existence

Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Truth

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Genius

Frivolity, under whatever form it appears, takes from attention its strength, from thought its originality, from feeling its earnestness.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael

The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Mistake, Conscience

When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Age, Aging

O, Memory, thou bitter-sweet—both a joy and a scourge.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Memory

Speech happens to not be his language
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Speech

When we destroy an old prejudice, we have need of a new virtue.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Prejudice

The more I see of men, the more I like dogs.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Topics: Men

Men err from selfishness; women because they are weak.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael

Divine wisdom, intending to detain us some time on earth, has done well to cover with a veil the prospect of the life to come; for if our sight could clearly distinguish the opposite bank, who would remain on this tempestuous coast of time?
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael

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