“A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.”
Un homme doit savoir braver l'opinion; une femme s'y soumettre.
Delphine (1802), epigraph
The epigraph is taken from the writings of de Staël's mother, Suzanne Necker.
“Love is the whole history of a woman's life; it is an episode in a man's.”
L'amour est l'histoire de la vie des femmes; c'est un épisode dans celle des hommes.
A Treatise on the Influence of the Passions (De l'influence des passions, 1796), Section 1, ch. 4
“Ought not every woman, like every man, to follow the bent of her own talents?”
Bk. 14, ch. 1
Corinne (1807)
“The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.”
Sometimes published as an anonymous saying, this was attributed to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in Is It Nothing To You? Social Purity, A Grave Moral Question (1884) by Henry Rowley, p. 88; to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in "Would You Be Re-elected", Munsey's Magazine (April 1909), p. 769; and to de Staël in Aspects of Western Civilization : Problems and Sources in History (2003), p. 294
Disputed