Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Edmund (Louis Antoine Huot) de Goncourt (1822-1896) and Jules (Alfred Huot) de Goncourt

French Writers and Collaborators, known as Brothers Goncourt

"Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity."

"Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs."

"Nothing is repeated, and everything is unparalleled."

"Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate."

"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."

"If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion."

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