Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
With everyone born human, a poet - an artist - is born, who dies young and who is survived by an adult.Collection: Wise
Nature wants us to enjoy life to the full and die without giving it a second thought; Christianity wants the opposite.Collection: Opposites
If you want to succeed, limit yourself.Collection: Want
Despair itself if it goes on long enough, can become a kind of sanctuary in which one settles down and feels at ease.Collection: Long
There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.Collection: People
I have always thought that if we began for one moment to say what we thought, society would collapse.Collection: Honesty
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.Collection: Reading
In most men there exists a poet who died young, whom the man survived.Collection: Men
Since it is necessary to have enemies, let us endeavour to have those who do us honour.Collection: Enemy
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.Collection: Teacher
Most celebrated men live in a condition of prostitution.Collection: Men
A philosophical thought has probably not attained all its sharpness and all its illumination until it is expressed in French.Collection: Philosophical
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.Collection: Beautiful
What signifies the ladder, provided one rise and attain the end?Collection: Ladders
The greatest of all French critics, and possibly the greatest European critic since Aristotle .Collection: Critics