1.
With everyone born human, a poet - an artist - is born, who dies young and who is survived by an adult.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
2.
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
3.
There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
4.
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
5.
I have always thought that if we began for one moment to say what we thought, society would collapse.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
6.
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
7.
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
8.
If you want to succeed, limit yourself.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
9.
In most men there exists a poet who died young, whom the man survived.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
10.
Since it is necessary to have enemies, let us endeavour to have those who do us honour.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
11.
Most celebrated men live in a condition of prostitution.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
12.
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
13.
A philosophical thought has probably not attained all its sharpness and all its illumination until it is expressed in French.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
14.
What signifies the ladder, provided one rise and attain the end?
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
15.
The greatest of all French critics, and possibly the greatest European critic since Aristotle .
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve