Loving the Good and loving the True / The psychology of desire: men and women

"A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it." - Sir Thomas Beecham

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"There is the love of the good for the good's sake, and the love of the truth for the truth's sake. I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good's sake; but very few, indeed, and scarcely one woman, love the truth for the truth's sake. Yet without the latter, the former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of persecution of the truth, — the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty and party zealotry. To see clearly that the love of the good and the true is ultimately identical — is given only to those who love both sincerely and without any foreign ends."

--- Specimens of the table talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge / Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Also in the above:

"The man's desire is for the woman ; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man."

This is phrased differently when quoted in The Edinburgh review, and a popular variant online is credited to Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (Madame de Staël), but I was unable to find anything close to it in Oeuvres complètes de Madame la baronne de Staël-Holstein.