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.
ATTRIBUTION:
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. “Culture,” The Conduct of Life (1860).
Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) was a French-Swiss novelist and essayist whose great work Germany (De l’Allemagne), written in 1810, was a profound influence on Emerson as a young man and introduced him to German romanticism.
