Edmond de Goncourt quotes

Edmond de Goncourt was a French writer, critic, and publisher, recognized for his collaboration with his brother Jules. Together, they became pioneers of literary naturalism and chroniclers of 19th-century French society. He founded the prestigious Prix Goncourt, which remains one of France's most renowned literary awards. Here are 15 of his quotes:

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

Edmond de Goncourt

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

Edmond de Goncourt

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.

Edmond de Goncourt

Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.

Edmond de Goncourt

Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.

Edmond de Goncourt

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

Edmond de Goncourt

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

Edmond de Goncourt

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

Edmond de Goncourt

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Edmond de Goncourt

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

Edmond de Goncourt

The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals.

Edmond de Goncourt

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

Edmond de Goncourt

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.

Edmond de Goncourt