Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve Quotes

“For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.”

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

“Tell me who loves, who admires you, and I will tell you who you are.”

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

“I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind.”

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

“Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.”

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

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

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

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

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

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

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

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

“If you want to succeed, limit yourself.”

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

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

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

“Most celebrated men live in a condition of prostitution.”

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

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

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

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

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

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

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve