Alfred de Vigny Quotes
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History is a novel for which the people is the author.
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Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.
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The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart. We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements. 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. These embrace the whole of life. But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
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Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.
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Poetry is the disease of the brain.
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Only silence is great; all else is weakness.
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I love the majesty of human suffering.
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Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.
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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
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Silence alone is great; all else is feebleness . . . Perform with all your heart your long and heavy task. . . . Then as do I, say naught, but suffer and die.
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What is a great life if not a youthful idea executed by a man of mature years.
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What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?
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The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.
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Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?
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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?
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Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?
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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
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Honour is manly decency. The shame of being found wanting in it means everything to us. Is this, then, the indefinable, the sacred thing?
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The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.
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On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.
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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
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The events I sought were never as great as I needed them to be.
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Greatness is the dream of youth realized in old age.
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The true God, the mighty God, is the God of ideas.
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Hope is the biggest of our foolish things.
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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?
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The loveliest Muse in the world does not feed her owner; these girls make fine mistresses but terrible wives
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But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
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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.
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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.
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