Anne Louise Germaine de Staël: Quotes about life

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël was Swiss author. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël: 84   quotes 1   like

“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.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël book Delphine

Delphine (1802), Preface

Life , Truth , Feeling , Nature

“Life often seems like a long shipwreck, of which the débris are friendship, fame, and love.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

Reflections on Suicide (Réflexions sur le suicide, 1813), Section 1

Love , Life , Friendship

“One must, in one's life, make a choice between boredom and suffering.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

Letter to Claude Hochet (Summer 1800), quoted in J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 223
Herold comments: "Her decision was emphatically in favor of suffering, which after all was a pleasure compared to boredom." (p. 224)
The actual quotation is from a letter from Mme de Staël to Claude Hochet dated October 1, 1800 : «Il faut choisir dans la vie entre l’ennui et le tourment : je donne l’un et l’hiver l’autre» (Germaine de Staël, Correspondance générale. Tome IV. Première partie. Du directoire au Consulat. 1er décembre 1796-15 décembre 1800, texte établi et présenté par Béatrice W. Jasinski, Paris, Chez Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1976, xii/337 p., p. 326).

Suffering , Life

“Love is the whole history of a woman's life; it is an episode in a man's.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

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

Love , Life , History

“A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël book Corinne

Bk. 10, ch. 5
Corinne (1807)

Life

“Superstition attaches to this life, and religion to the next; superstition is allied to fatality, and religion to virtue; it is from the vivacity of earthly desires that we become superstitious, and it is, on the contrary, by the sacrifice of these same desires that we are religious.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

Ten Years' Exile (Dix années d'exil, written 1810–1813, posthumously published 1821), ch. 16

Life , Religion