“Frivolity, under whatever form it appears, deprives attention of its power, thought of its originality, and sentiment of its depth.”
Bk. 1, ch. 3
Corinne (1807)
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Anne Louise Germaine de Staël 42
Swiss author 1766–1817Related quotes
Source: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The beauty of a move lies not in its appearance but in the thought behind it.”
Quoted in Nimzovich : The Hypermodern (1948) by Fred Reinfeld

“The beauty of a move lies not in its appearance but in the thought behind it.”
Aron Nimzowitsch, as quoted in Nimzovich : The Hypermodern (1948) by Fred Reinfeld
Misattributed

The Origins of Art (1966)
Other Quotes
Context: What I am searching for... is some formula that would combine individual initiative with universal values, and that combination would give us a truly organic form. Form, which we discover in nature by analysis, is obstinately mathematical in its manifestations—which is to say that creation in art requires thought and deliberation. But this is not to say that form can be reduced to a formula. In every work of art it must be re-created, but that too is true of every work of nature. Art differs from nature not in its organic form, but in its human origins: in the fact that it is not God or a machine that makes a work of art, but an individual with his instincts and intuitions, with his sensibility and his mind, searching relentlessly for the perfection that is neither in mind nor in nature, but in the unknown. I do not mean this in an other-worldly sense, only that the form of the flower is unknown to the seed.

Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic

“The success of a relationship should be measured by its depth, not by its length.”
The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships (2015)

1960s, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)
Context: Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. … Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites — polar opposites — so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.
It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on. What has happened is that we have had it wrong and confused in our own country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience.
This is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

Michel Henry, Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair, éd. du Seuil, 2000, p. 373
Books on Religion and Christianity, Incarnation: A philosophy of Flesh (2000)
Original: (fr) Notre chair porte en elle le principe de sa manifestation, et cette manifestation n’est pas l’apparaître du monde. En son auto-impressionnalité pathétique, en sa chair même, donnée à soi en l’Archi-passibilité de la Vie absolue, elle révèle celle-ci qui la révèle à soi, elle est en son pathos l’Archi-révélation de la Vie, la Parousie de l’absolu. Au fond de sa Nuit, notre chair est Dieu.