Hippolyte Taine Quotes
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A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.
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For thirty centuries, from her sacred seat the cat looked down, and crouching at her feet, beheld the race of conquering Pharaohs kneel.
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I wish to reproduce things as they are or as they would be even if I myself did not exist.
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History is nothing but a problem of mechanics applied to psychology.
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Amid this vast and overwhelming space and in these boundless solar archipelagoes, how small is our own sphere, and the earth, what a grain of sand!
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There are four types of men in the world: lovers, opportunists, lookers-on, and imbeciles. The happiest are the imbeciles.
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The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of quantities; they must be treated with precision. I have never had more satisfaction than in proving this in the realms of art, politics and history.
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The search for causes must come after the collection of facts.
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There are as many kinds of modesty as there are races. To the English woman it is a duty; to the French woman a propriety.
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Four varieties in society: lovers, the ambitious, observers, and fools. The fools are the happiest.
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The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.
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Change a virtue in its circumstances find it becomes a vice; change a vice in its circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of a man is found concealed far below these moral badges.
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In the stormy current of life characters are weights or floats which at one time make us glide along the bottom, and at another maintain us on the surface.
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Kindly politeness is the slow fruit of advanced reflection; it is a sort of humanity and kindliness applied to small acts and every day discourse: it bids man soften towards others, and forget himself for the sake of others: it constrains genuine nature, which is selfish and gross.
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His tongue is by turns a sponge, a brush, a comb. He cleans himself, he smooths himself, he knows what is proper.
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I've met many thinkers and many cats, but the wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
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We study ourselves three weeks, we love each other three months, we squabble three years, we tolerate each other thirty years, and then the children start all over again.
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Man may be considered as a superior species of animal that produces philosophies and poems in about the same way a silkworm produces their cocoons and bees their hives.
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To have a true idea of man or of life, one must have stood himself on the brink of suicide, or on the door-sill of insanity, at least once.
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