Hippolyte Taine

French critic and historian

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

Art is a general idea made as particular as possible.

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

Le style

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

J'ai fais ça

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

The true regulations for the Doctorate.
—To his sister Virginie, 20 July 1852

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

I have but few favorable chances in the great official road; one only progresses in it with tortoise steps, and great promotion is bought by great acts of cowardice or by a natural servility.
—6 July 1852

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

The longer I live the lower I bring down the level at which my mind had placed mankind; I think I shall have to bring it yet lower to reach the proper height.
—6 July 1852

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

“Under an absolute government the first condition of success is to have neither enthusiasm nor wit.”
—Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

2/2 on that, prose, a little poetry, perhaps, a few flowers by those insipid dishes—Art, conversation, the country, added to the daily flatness of work and housekeeping.
—22 June 1852

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

1/2 There are but two régimes in this world: 1° opium, intoxication, ecstasy, languor, sickness and death; and 2° boiled beef, monotony, boredom and health;

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

They are intolerant cowards, and nothing is worse than
inquisitorial hares.
—27 June 1852

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

It is only by living as I do, in abstract science, that one can dispense with companionship. Those who lack this passion do not know what to do with themselves; my schoolfellows get married or take to cafés, or become as dull as caged birds.
—To his mother, 7 June 1852

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

It must be borne in mind that he is envious and spiteful, avenging himself for his incapacity on those whose competency makes him sensible of his incompetency….

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

@gabridli Indeed

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

This great lesson is to be gathered from it all: that it is unnecessary to think in order to make one’s way; that lack of ideas is esteemed and sought after, and that perfection consists in being an automaton, because an automaton is more docile than an intelligent being.

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

Unhappy with his students in Poitiers: "they write me impossible orations, with which I am perfectly sickened. Imagine the extreme of bad taste, cold declamation, noble style, prosopopoeia and hypotyposis, and, especially, an unapproachable lack of ideas."

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

I have read the last volume of Hegel’s Logic. Alas, another lost illusion! It is great, but it is not true Metaphysics; the method is artificial, and that much-lauded Construction of the Absolute is useless.

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

I perceive from day to day that the number of great men is infinitely small. This place is a perfect Sahara as far as ideas are concerned.

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

As soon as you take it upon yourself to consider your adversaries as so many driven sheep, and to despise in them the sanctity of the human will, you give them the same right against yourself....

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

If the enlightened minority has the right of forcing the stupid majority, one enlightened man has the right of forcing the stupid unanimity, which is the justification not of royalty, but of tyranny. (January 18, 1852)

[Hippolyte Taine @hippolyte_taine]

The real solution would be the education of the people; they will have it in a hundred years.