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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

If you want to succeed, limit yourself.

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

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

Most celebrated men live in a condition of prostitution.

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.

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

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

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