Two kinds of symbol must surely be distinguished. The algebraic symbol comes naked into the world of mathematics and is clothed wi...th value by its masters. A poetic symbol--like the Rose, for Love, in Guillaume de Lorris--comes trailing clouds of glory from the real world, clouds whose shape and colour largely determine and explain its poetic use. In an equation, x and y will do as well as a and b; but the Romance of the Rose could not, without loss, be re-written as the Romance of the Onion, and if a man did not see why, we could only send him back to the real world to study roses, onions, and love, all of them still untouched by poetry, still raw.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In France, and at the most important period of our history, Catherine de' Medici has suffered more from popular error than any oth...er woman, unless it be Brunehaut or Frédégonde; while Marie de' Medici, whose every action was prejudicial to France, has escaped the disgrace that should cover her name.... Catherine de' Medici ... saved the throne of France, she maintained [the] Royal authority under circumstances to which more than one great prince would have succumbed. Face to face with such leaders of the factions and ambitions of the houses of Guise and of Bourbon as the two Cardinals de Lorraine and the two "Balafrès," the two Princes de Condé, Queen Jeanne d'Albret, Henri IV, the Connétable de Montmorency, Calvin, the Colignys and Théodore de Bèze, she was forced to put forth the rarest fine qualities, the most essential gifts of statesmanship, under the fire of the Calvinist press.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a social respect necessary in company: you may start your own subject of conversation with modesty, taking care, however,... de ne jamais parler de cordes dans la maison d'un pendu.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Et Saint Apollinaire, raide et ascétique, Vieille usine désaffectée de Dieu, tient encore... Dans ses pierres éecroulantes la forme précise de Byzance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Madame d'Estampes and Madame de Valentinois make me fear that I should be only honoured by my husband as a queen and not loved by ...him as a woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You cannot have one well-bred man without a whole society of such. They keep each other up to any high point. Especially women;Mit... requires a great many cultivated women,--saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to elegant society, in order that you have one Madame de Staël.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubio...us ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »