Alfred de Vigny Quotes

Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?

Invisible is real. Souls have their own world.

On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.

Only silence is great; all else is weakness.

Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?

Greatness is the dream of youth realized in old age.

Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.

Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.

History is a novel for which the people is the author.

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

The events I sought were never as great as I needed them to be.

I love the majesty of human suffering.

Perform your long and heavy task with energy, treading the path to which Fate has been pleased to call you.

What is a great life? It is the dreams of youth realised in old age.

Poetry is the disease of the brain.

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?

A calm despair, without angry convulsions or reproaches directed at heaven, is the essence of wisdom.

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?

The true God, the mighty God, is the God of ideas.

The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.

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.

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.

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

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.