Top 46 Alfred De Vigny Quotes
#2. No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart.
Alfred De Vigny
#3. Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.
Alfred De Vigny
#4. What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?
Alfred De Vigny
#5. One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.
Alfred De Vigny
#6. To hold power has always meant to manipulate idiots and circumstances; and those circumstances and those idiots, tossed together, bring about those coincidences to which even the greatest men confess they owe most of their fame
Alfred De Vigny
#7. The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.
Alfred De Vigny
#8. Just as we descend into our consciences to judge of actions which our minds can not weigh, can we not also search in ourselves for the feeling which gives birth to forms of thought, always vague and cloudy?
Alfred De Vigny
#9. Do you know that charming part of our country which has been called the garden of France - that spot where, amid verdant plains watered by wide streams, one inhales the purest air of heaven?
Alfred De Vigny
#10. But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
Alfred De Vigny
#11. The loveliest Muse in the world does not feed her owner; these girls make fine mistresses but terrible wives
Alfred De Vigny
#12. The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.
Alfred De Vigny
#13. The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds
Alfred De Vigny
#14. The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.
Alfred De Vigny
#16. On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.
Alfred De Vigny
#18. History is a novel for which the people is the author.
Alfred De Vigny
#19. From this, without doubt, sprang the fable. Man created it thus, because it was not given him to see more than himself and nature, which surrounds him; but he created it true with a truth all its own.
Alfred De Vigny
#20. The acts of the human race on the world's stage have doubtless a coherent unity, but the meaning of the vast tragedy enacted will be visible only to the eye of God, until the end, which will reveal it perhaps to the last man.
Alfred De Vigny
#21. Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?
Alfred De Vigny
#22. Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?
Alfred De Vigny
#23. We shall find in our troubled hearts, where discord reigns, two needs which seem at variance, but which merge, as I think, in a common source - the love of the true, and the love of the fabulous.
Alfred De Vigny
#24. Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?
Alfred De Vigny
#25. Observe this fact: in the history of mankind, every ruler who has lacked personal greatness has been forced to compensate for the deficiency by setting up the executioner at his right hand like a guardian angel
Alfred De Vigny
#26. Hope is the greatest madness. What can we expect of a world that we enter with the assurance of seeing our fathers and mothers die? A world where, if two beings love each other and give their lives to each other, both can be sure that one will watch the other perish?
Alfred De Vigny
#27. The events I sought were never as great as I needed them to be.
Alfred De Vigny
#28. France, for example, loves at the same time history and the drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and the other the individual lot of man.
Alfred De Vigny
#30. A calm despair, without angry convulsions or reproaches directed at heaven, is the essence of wisdom.
Alfred De Vigny
#31. Perform your long and heavy task with energy, treading the path to which Fate has been pleased to call you.
Alfred De Vigny
#33. Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.
Alfred De Vigny
#34. What is a great life? It is the dreams of youth realised in old age.
Alfred De Vigny
#35. What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?
Alfred De Vigny
#36. I have a private theory, Sir, that there are no heroes and no monsters in this world. Only children should be allowed to use these words
Alfred De Vigny
#40. Honour is manly decency. The shame of being found wanting in it means everything to us. Is this, then, the indefinable, the sacred thing?
Alfred De Vigny
#41. Oh, I have a habit of letting myself be lectured on the things I know best. I like to see if they are understood in the same way I understand; for there are many ways of knowing the same thing
Alfred De Vigny
#42. We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements.
Alfred De Vigny
#43. I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.
Alfred De Vigny
#44. Those intellectuals are our natural enemies; the only kind who are worth anything are the musicians and the dancers: they don't insult anybody with their performances, and they neither sing nor dance politics. So I like them; but don't let me hear a word about the rest
Alfred De Vigny
#46. What it values most of all is the sum total of events and the advance of civilization, which carries individuals along with it; but, indifferent to details, it cares less to have them real than noble or, rather, grand and complete.
Alfred De Vigny
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