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Perfect works are rare, because they must be produced at the happy moment when taste and genius unite; and this rare conjuncture, like that of certain planets, appears to occur only after the revolution of several cycles, and only lasts for an instant.

— François-René de Chateaubriand

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More quotes by François-René de Chateaubriand

I am Bourbon as a matter of honour, royalist according to reason and conviction, and republican by taste and character.

De la restauration et de la monarchie élective (1831)

The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

As soon as a true thought has entered our mind, it gives a light which makes us see a crowd of other objects which we have never perceived before.

In living literature no person is a competent judge but of works written in his own language.

I have explored the seas of the Old World and the New, and trodden the soil of the four quarters of the Earth.

Mémoires d'outre-tombe (1848)

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Each of these private teachers who work for pay ... inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom.

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Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.

Wilhelm Reich Philosophy : An Introduction to the Art of Wondering (2005)

Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël De l’Allemagne [Germany (1813)

Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite.

Louis Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: François-René de Chateaubriand (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.