Alexandre Dumas Quotes - Page 5

I am a count, not a saint.

I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride.

When a man resolves to avenge himself, he should first of all tear out the heart from his breast.

God orders a man to do all he can to save his life.

Here is your final lesson - do not commit the crime for which you now serve the sentence. God said, "Vengeance is mine." [...] He believes in you.

...joy takes a strange effect at times, it seems to oppress us almost the same as sorrow.

Now I'd like someone to tell me there is no drama in real life!

He's right: They have to put madmen with madmen.

...remember that what has once been done may be done again.

Misfortune does not help us to believe.

I do not often laugh, sir, as you may perceive by the air of my countenance; but nevertheless, I retain the privilege of laughing when I please.

I have been taken by Satan into the highest mountain in the earth, and when there he said he to me, ‘Child of earth, what wouldst thou have to make thee adore me?’ I replied, ‘Listen, I wish to be Providence myself, for I feel that the most beautiful, noblest, most sublime thing in the world, is to recompense and punish.

...but my friends call me Edmund Dantes.

Wait and hope!

We are always in a hurry to be happy...; for when we have suffered a long time, we have great difficulty in believing in good fortune.

So, preferring death to capture, I accomplished the most astonishing deeds, and which, more then once, showed me that the too great care we take of our bodies is the only obstacle to the sucess of those projects which require rapid decision, and vigorous and determined execution. In reality, when you have once devoted your life to your enterprises, you are no longer the equal of other men, or, rather, other men are no longer your equals, and whosoever has taken this resolution, feels his strength and resources doubled.

I came to Paris with four écus in my pocket, and I’d have fought with anybody who told me I was in no condition to buy the Louvre.

Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.

But that's not the name of a man, it's the name of a mountain! (...) "It is my name," Athos said calmly. "But you said your name was d'Artagnan." "I?" "Yes, you." "That is to say, someone said to me: 'You are M. d'Artagnan?' I replied: 'You think so?' My guards shouted that they were sure of it. I did not want to vex them. Besides, I might have been mistaken.

Every individual, from the highest to the lowest degree, has his place in the ladder of social life, and around him swirls a little world of interests, composed of stormy passions and conflicting atoms

Capricious and unfaithful, the king wished to be called Louis the Just and Louis the Chaste. Posterity will find a difficulty in understanding this character, which history explains only by facts and never by reason.

So rapid is the flight of our dreams upon the wings of imagination.

There are people who are willing to suffer and swallow their tears at leisure, and God will no doubt reward them in heaven for their resignation; but those who have the will to struggle strike back at fate in retaliation for the blows they receive.

We must never expect discretion in first love: it is accompanied by such excessive joy that unless the joy is allowed to overflow, it will choke you.

Without reflecting that this is the only moment in which you can study character," said the count; "on the steps of the scaffold death tears off the mask that has been worn through life, and the real visage is disclosed.