Hippolyte Taine quotes

Hippolyte Taine was a French historian, critic, and philosopher who played a key role in 19th-century intellectual life. His works emphasized the influence of environment, race, and moment on human behavior and social development. He became a leading figure of literary realism and positively influenced the study of literature and history. Here are 5 of his quotes:

The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.

Hippolyte Taine

Napoleon, far more Italian than French, Italian by race, by instinct, imagination, and souvenir, considers in his plan the future of Italy, and, on casting up the final accounts of his reign, we find that the net profit is for Italy and the net loss is for France.

Hippolyte Taine

[Concerning the love La Fontaine felt for animals] He follows their emotions, he represents their reasonings, he becomes tender, he becomes gay, he participates in their feelings. The factis, he lived in them. [...] The animals contain all the materials of man-sensations, judgments, images.

Hippolyte Taine

One puts in the hands of each adult a ballot, but on the back of each soldier a knapsack: with what promises of massacre and bankruptcy for the Twentieth Century, with what exasperation of ill will and distrust, with what loss of wholesome effort, by what a perversion of productive discoveries, accompanied by what an improvement in the means of destruction, by what recoil toward the inferior and unhealthy forms of the old combative societies, by what a backward step toward egoistic and brutal instincts, toward the sentiments, manner and morality of ancient cities and barbaric tribes, we know all too well.

Hippolyte Taine