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Hippolyte Taine Quotes

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French critic and historian. He was the chief theoretical influence of French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. Literary historicism as a critical movement has been said to originate with him. Taine is also remembered for his attempts to provide a scientific account of literature.

Taine had a profound effect on French literature; the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica asserted that "the tone which pervades the works of Zola, Bourget and Maupassant can be immediately attributed to the influence we call Taine's." Through his work on the French Revolution, Taine has been credited as having ', ‘forged the architectural structure of modern French right-wing historiography’. Wikipedia  

✵ 21. April 1828 – 5. March 1893   •   Other names Hipólito Taine, Hyppolite Taine
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Hippolyte Taine: 3   quotes 2   likes

Famous Hippolyte Taine Quotes

“Napoleon, far more Italian than French, Italian by race, by instinct, imagination, and souvenir, considers in his plan the future of Italy, and, on casting up the final accounts of his reign, we find that the net profit is for Italy and the net loss is for France.”

Hippolyte Taine

" Napoleon's Views of Religion https://archive.org/stream/jstor-25102177/25102177_djvu.txt" (1891)

“The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.”

Hippolyte Taine

Philosophy of Art (1865)

“[Concerning the love La Fontaine felt for animals] He follows their emotions, he represents their reasonings, he becomes tender, he becomes gay, he participates in their feelings. The factis, he lived in them. […] The animals contain all the materials of man-sensations, judgments, images.”

Hippolyte Taine

La Fontaine et ses Fables (1853–1861), Hachette, 1911, p. 166 and 107; as quoted in Matthieu Ricard, A Plea for the Animals, trans. Sherab Chödzin Kohn, Shambhala Publications, 2016, p. 102.

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