Alfred de Musset Quotes - Page 3

Nothing is a sin when you obey the orders of a priest

In love matters; keep your pen from paper.

It is easy to promise, and alas! How easy to forget!

Become corrupt, corrupt, and you will cease to suffer!" This has been the cry of all cities to man.

Oh! my friend, when you feel bursting on your lips the vow of eternal love, do not be afraid to yield, but do not confound wine with intoxication; do not think the cup divine because the draft is of celestial flavor; do not be astonished to find it broken and empty in the evening.

Things they don't understand always cause a sensation among the English.

I can't help it, the idea of the infinite torments me.

The apartments of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: a conglomeration of classical antiquity, gothic, renaissance; Louis XIII... Something from every century but our own, a predicament that has arisen in no other period... so that we seem to be subsisting on the ruins of the past, as if the end of the world were near.

Christianity ruined emperors, but saved peoples.

There are temptations more attractive than angels. Liberty, Patriotism, the good of humanity – words like that are the silver scales of the Tempter’s flaming wings

A lively retrospect summons back to us once more our youth, with vivid reflex of its early joys and unstained pleasures.

Disgrace is the synonym of discovery.

Vanity and dignity are incompatible with each other; vain women are almost sure to be vulnerable.

Is is true that dictators never dream because they can change their smallest fantasies into realities if they want to?

Repartee is altogether a natural endowment, and is the lightning of the mind.

It was one of those somber evenings when the sighing of the wind resembles the moans of a dying man; a storm was brewing, and between the splashes of rain on the windows there was the silence of death. All nature suffers in such moments; the trees writhe in pain and twist their heads; the birds of the fields cower under the bushes; the streets of cities are deserted.

What a frightful weapon is human thought! It is our defense and our safeguard, the most precious gift that God has made us. It is ours and it obeys us; we may launch it forth into space, but, once outside of our feeble brains, it is gone; we can no longer control it.

Look at the sun! It’s dry, it’s dead, it needs a drink, it wants blood! And I’ll give it blood!

The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer

Taxes are a universal burden in moral as well as in civil life. There is not a pleasure, social or otherwise, which is not assessed by fate at its full value!