Paul Bourget quotes

Paul Bourget was a French novelist, poet, and critic recognized for his psychological novels and essays. His works often explored complex moral issues and the changing nature of society in late 19th-century France. He left a lasting impact on French literature and intellectual life. Here are 47 of his quotes:

There are some surely whom you like and whom you dislike, for whom you entertain esteem and for whom you feel contempt? Have you not thought that you have some duties toward them, that you can aid them in leading better lives?

Paul Bourget

There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity.

Paul Bourget

Look at Goethe, at Lamartine and at many others! To depict feelings on this high plane, you must give up the process of minute and insignificant observation which is the bane of the artists of to-day.

Paul Bourget

At certain moments, words are nothing; it is the tone in which they are uttered.

Paul Bourget

The forests have taught man liberty.

Paul Bourget

There is iconoclasm in the excessively intellectual, and they delight in destroying their dearest moral or sentimental idols, the better to prove their strength.

Paul Bourget

Have the courage to analyze great emotions to create characters who shall be lofty and true. The whole art of the analytical novel lies there.

Paul Bourget

Even after making up one's mind to the sacrifices I had decided upon, there is always left a trace of envy for those who have triumphed in the melancholy struggle for literary supremacy.

Paul Bourget

There is no such thing as an age for love ... because the man capable of loving - in the complex and modern sense of love as a sort of ideal exaltation - never ceases to love.

Paul Bourget

Could she not obtain from him the promise to discharge his weapon in the air, if the duel was with pistols, or, if it was with swords, simply to disarm his enemy? Like nearly all persons unversed in the art, she believed in infallible fencers, in marksmen who never missed their aim, and she had also ideas profoundly, absolutely inexact on the relations of one man with another in the matter of an insult.

Paul Bourget

When a man has been the lover of a woman as that man had been hers, with the vibrating communion of a voluptuousness unbroken for two years, that woman maintains a sort of physiological, quasi-animal instinct. A gesture, the accent of a word, a sigh, a blush, a pallor, are signs for her that her intuition interprets with infallible certainty. How and why is that instinct accompanied by absolute oblivion of former caresses? It is a particular case of that insoluble and melancholy problem of the birth and death of love.

Paul Bourget

There is an intelligent man, who never questions his ideas," said Dorsenne to himself, when the Marquis had left him. "He is like the Socialists. What vigor of mind in that old wornout machine!

Paul Bourget

The cruelest revenge of a woman is to remain faithful to a man.

Paul Bourget

I have retired to Nemours to work upon a novel called The Age for Love, and it is on this subject that I wished to consult you, my dear master.

Paul Bourget

You wished to be only a spectator, the gentleman in the balcony who wipes the glasses of his lorgnette in order to lose none of the comedy. Well, you could not do so. That role is not permitted a man. He must act, and he acts always, even when he thinks he is looking on, even when he washes his hands as Pontius Pilate, that dilettante, too, who uttered the words of your masters and of yourself. What is truth? Truth is that there is always and everywhere a duty to fulfil.

Paul Bourget

My friend returned to the gallery, looked once more at the adorable imprint of the most innocent, the most passionate of caresses. A mirror hung near by, where he could compare his present with his former face, the man he was with the man he had been. He never told me and I never asked what his feelings were at that moment. Did he feel that he was too culpable to have inspired a passion in a young girl whom he would have been a fool, almost a criminal, to marry? Did he comprehend that through his age which was so apparent, it was his youth which this child loved? Did he remember, with a keenness that was all too sad, that other, who had never given him a kiss like that at a time when he might have returned it? I only know that he left the same day, determined never again to see one whom he could no longer love as he had loved the other, with the hope, the purity, the soul of a man of twenty.

Paul Bourget

We'll get even with him on his next volume. But you know, Labarthe, as long as you continue to have that innocent look about you, you can't expect to succeed in newspaper work.

Paul Bourget

Was I saved? Was I lost? All depended on the moment at which somebody might go into my stepfather's room.

Paul Bourget

I shall always believe that it was his own story under another name, and I love to believe it because it was so exactly his way of looking at things...

Paul Bourget

It is vain to try to sacrifice once for all one's youthful ideals.

Paul Bourget

My poor aunt! She thought me made of sterner stuff than I really was. There was no need of her advice to prevent my being consumed by the desire for vengeance which had been the fixed star of my early youth, the blood-colored beacon aflame in my night.

Paul Bourget

You have no right to put on paper, to give to the public what this noble writer said to you, supposing that he was receiving a poet, not a reporter.

Paul Bourget