Alfred de Vigny Quotes - Page 2

The loveliest Muse in the world does not feed her owner; these girls make fine mistresses but terrible wives

Doubt is the freedom of thought. Any claim to truth can be doubted.

Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?

I admit that I myself am far from having a complete command of every topic I touch on, but my knowledge of my subject is always greater than the interest or the understanding of my auditors. You see, there is one very good thing about mankind; the mediocre masses make very few demands of the mediocrities of a higher order, submitting stupidly and cheerfully to their guidance

What is a great life if not a youthful idea executed by a man of mature years.

Hope is the biggest of our foolish things.

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

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?

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?

The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.

Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.

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.

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.

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

What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?

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.

Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

An army is a nation within a nation, it is one of the vices of courage.

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.

The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.

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.

We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements.

Honour is manly decency. The shame of being found wanting in it means everything to us. Is this, then, the indefinable, the sacred thing?

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.

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.