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Art
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A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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Beauty
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There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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Books
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A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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One of the proud joys of the man of letters --if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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Boredom
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There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures me as to our value: the boredom that afflicts us. It is the hall-mark of quality in modern men.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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Facts
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The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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Listening
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Never speak of yourself to others; make them talk about themselves instead; therein lies the whole art of pleasing. Everybody knows it, and everyone forgets it.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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Love
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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
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Mankind, Man
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Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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Media
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That ephemeral sheet,... the newspaper, is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.
-Edmond de Goncourt, Journal, July 1858
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Modern, Modernism
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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
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Museums, Galleries
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That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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Self Respect
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Any man who does not see everything in terms of self, that is to say who wants to be something in respect of other men, to do good to them or simply give them something to do, is unhappy, disconsolate, and accursed.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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Violins
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A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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War
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I feel sure that coups d'?tat would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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Books by and about Edmond de Goncourt