Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve Quotes

• With everyone born human, a poet - an artist - is born, who dies young and who is survived by an adult.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Wise, Artist, Adults

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• Nature wants us to enjoy life to the full and die without giving it a second thought; Christianity wants the opposite.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Opposites, Giving, Enjoy Life

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• If you want to succeed, limit yourself.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Want, Limits, Succeed

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• Despair itself if it goes on long enough, can become a kind of sanctuary in which one settles down and feels at ease.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Long, Despair, Goes On

  "Poésies completes de Sainte-Beuve" by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Paris: Charpentier, p. 16 ("Vie de Joseph Delorme"), 1840.

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• There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  People, Clock, Certain

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• I have always thought that if we began for one moment to say what we thought, society would collapse.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Honesty, Moments, Collapse

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• Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the first-raters.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Reading, People, Rooms

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• In most men there exists a poet who died young, whom the man survived.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Men, Poetry, He Man

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• Since it is necessary to have enemies, let us endeavour to have those who do us honour.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Enemy, Endeavour, Honour

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1875). “English Portraits”, p.91, London : Daldy, Isbister

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• The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three [Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden and George Saintsbury], the greatest critic that ever lived - not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Teacher, Three, Wonderful

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• Most celebrated men live in a condition of prostitution.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Men, Fame, Prostitution

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• A philosophical thought has probably not attained all its sharpness and all its illumination until it is expressed in French.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Philosophical, Illumination, Sharpness

  "Society for Pure English, Tract 05: The Englishing of French Words; the Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems" by Society for Pure English, June 5, 2004.

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• If I had a device, it would be the true, the true only, leaving the beautiful and the good to settle matters afterwards as best they could.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Beautiful, Truth, Leaving

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1875). “English Portraits”, p.83, London : Daldy, Isbister

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• What signifies the ladder, provided one rise and attain the end?

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Ladders, Ends

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• The greatest of all French critics, and possibly the greatest European critic since Aristotle .

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Critics

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