Quotes by Edmond Goncourt

• Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.
• Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.
• The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.
• That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.
• People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.
• Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.
• If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.
• A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
• Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.
• Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
• Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.
• As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.
• A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
• Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.