Edmond de Goncourt

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present. ”

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence. ”

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization. ”

Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins. ”

The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals. ”

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug. ”

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it. ”