Madame de Staël
Madame de Stael (1766-1817), full name Anne Maria Louis Germaine Necker, Baroness de Stael-Holstein, was a French writer, novelist and literary critic. She was known for her salons, which attracted intelligentsia of the period.This distinguished French lady was born in Paris, daughter of Necker, and the only child. She was a woman of eminent ability, and an admirer of Rousseau. She wrote "Letters" on his character and works. She married a man ten years older than herself, the Baron de Staël-Holstein, the Swedish ambassador in Paris, where she lived all through the events of the Revolution in sympathy with the royal family. Mme Stael wrote an appeal in defence of the queen, and quitted the city during the Reign of Terror. On her return in 1795 her salon became the centre of the literary and political activity of the time. The ambition of Napoleon excited her distrust, and forced her into opposition so expressed that in 1801 she was ordered to leave Paris within 24 hours, and not to come within 40 leagues of it.
In 1802 she was left a widow, and soon after she went first to Weimar, where she met Goethe and Schiller, and then to Berlin. By-and-by she returned to France, but on the publication of her "Corinne," was ordered out of the country. After this appeared her great epoch-making work on Germany, "L'Allemagne," which was seized by the French censors. After this she quitted for good the soil of France, to which she had returned. She settled in Switzerland, at Coppet, where she died.
Wisdom & Quotes
- Intellect does not attain its full force until it attacks power.
- Tout comprendre rend tres indulgent.
- Corinne
- Divine wisdom, intending to detain us some time on earth, has done well to cover with a veil the prospect of the life to come; for if our sight could clearly distinguish the opposite bank, who would remain on this tempestuous coast of time?
- What matters in a character is not whether one holds this or that opinion: what matters is how proudly one upholds it.
- We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love.
- Genius has no sex.
- Kindness and generosity - form the true morality of human actions.
- Morality must guide calculation, and calculation must guide politics.
- The greatest happiness is to transform one's feelings into actions.
- One must choose in life between boredom and torment.
- Love is above the laws, above the opinion of men; it is the truth, the flame, the pure element, the primary idea of the moral world.
- In matter of the heart, nothing is true except the improbable.
- Love is the whole history of a woman's life; it is but an episode in a man's .
- That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present was itself founded on some past that went before it.
- The pursuit of politics is religion, morality, and poetry all in one.
Thomas Robert Malthus