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That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

Madame de Stael

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Madame de Stael
Age: 51 †
Born: 1766
Born: April 22
Died: 1817
Died: July 14
Correspondent
Diarist
Literary Critic
Politician
Salonnière
Writer
Paris
France
Madame de Staël
Madame Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël
Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker
Mme de Staël
Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël
Anne-Louise-Germaine
Mme de Staël-Holstein
Baroness de Staël-Holstein Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker
Anne-Louise Germaine Necker
Germaine de Staël-Holstein
Anne Louise Germaine de Stael-Holstein
Present
Went
Past
Precedent
Founded
Brought
Forward

More quotes by Madame de Stael

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The entire social order ... is arrayed against a woman who wants to rise to a man's reputation.
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Anything that happens gradually is always irrevocable.
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Who understands much, forgives much.
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Providence protects us in all the details of our lot.
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The world is the work of a single thought, expressed in a thousand different ways.
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Conversation as talent exists only in France. In other countries, conversation provides politeness, discussion, and friendship in France, it is an art for which imagination and soul are certainly very welcome, but which can also provide its own secret remedies to compensate you for the absence of either or both, if you so desire.
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Goethe has made a remark upon the perfectability of the human mind, which is full of sagacity: It is always advancing, but in a spiral line.
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I never was able to believe in the existence of next year except as in a metaphysical notion.
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The more we know the better we forgive. Whoever feels deeply, feels for all who live.
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Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.
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Kindness and generosity ... form the true morality of human actions.
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When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.
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Tombs decked by the arts can scarcely represent death as a formidable enemy we do not, indeed, like the ancients, carve sports and dances in the sarcophagus, but thought is diverted from the bier by works that tell of immortality, even from the altar of death.
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[On Napoleon:] One has the impression of an imperious wind blowing about one's ears when one is near that man.
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The greater part of what women write about women is mere sycophancy to man.
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It seems to me that life's circumstances, being ephemeral, teach us less about durable truths than the fictions based on those truths and that the best lessons of delicacy and self-respect are to be found in novels where the feelings are so naturally portrayed that you fancy you are witnessing real life as you read.
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Be happy, but be happy through piety.
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To live beneath sorrow, one must yield to it.
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Men do not change they unmask themselves.
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All music, even if its occasion be a gay one, renders us pensive.
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