Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, commonly known as Madame de Staël, was a woman of letters and political theorist of Genevan origin who in her lifetime witnessed at first-hand the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era up to the French Restoration. She was present at the Estates General of 1789 and at the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Her intellectual collaboration with Benjamin Constant between 1794 and 1810 made them one of the most celebrated intellectual couples of their time. She discovered sooner than others the tyrannical character and designs of Napoleon. For many years she lived as an exile – firstly during the Reign of Terror and later due to personal persecution by Napoleon.
Her political legacy has been generally identified with a stout defense of “liberal” values: equality, individual freedom and the limitation of state power by constitutional rules.Yet although she insisted to the Duke of Wellington that she needed politics in order to live, her attitude towards the propriety of female political engagement varied: at times she declared that women should simply be the guardians of domestic space for the opposite sex, while at others, that denying women access to the public sphere of activism and engagement was an abuse of human rights. (via Wikipedia)
Here are her great quotes about love, life and many more….
On Love:
Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.
Love is the whole history of a woman’s life, it is but an episode in a man’s.
Love is the emblem of eternity it confounds all notions of time effaces all memory of beginning, all fear of an end.
In matters of the heart, nothing is true except the improbable.
When a noble life has prepared for old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.
On Life:
A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.
The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.
On Happiness:
The greatest happiness is to transform one’s feelings into action.
On God:
The sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it; enthusiasm signifies God in us.
Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation, the source of strength is one’s self. When one prays, he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.
On Man:
Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man’s power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened.
Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.
The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.
Men err from selfishness; women because they are weak.
A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.