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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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