Alphonse de Lamartine Quotes - Page 3

Exquisite beauty resides rather in the female form than face, where it is also more lasting.

Barbarism recommences by the excess of civilization.

True greatness is sovereign wisdom. We are never deceived by our virtues.

We are earth's children, and life is the same in sap as in blood; all that the earth, our mother, feels and expresses to the eye by her form and aspect, in melancholy or in splendor, finds an echo within us.

The people only understand what they can feel; the only orators that can affect them are those who move them.

Virginity is the poetry, not the reality, of life.

Philosophy is the rational expression of genius.

Yet, in these autumn days when Nature expires, Here, in these veiled scenes, I find more attractions; It is a friend's sad goodbye; it is the last smile From lips that death is going to close forever!

It is for truth that God created genius.

Newspapers will ultimately engross all literature.

Assassination makes only martyrs, not converts.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. I am the fellow citizen of every being that thinks; my country is Truth.

Man is born barbarous--he is ransomed from the condition of beasts only by being cultivated.

Photography is better than art. It is a solar phenomenon in which the artist collaborates with the sun.

I am persuaded that if the brutes even--if the dog, the horse, the ox, the elephant, the bird, could speak, they would confess, that, at the bottom of their nature, their instincts, their sensations, their obtuse intelligence, assisted by organs less perfect than ours, there is a clouded, secret sentiment of this existence of a superior and primordial Being, from whom all emanates, and to whom all returns.

Esteem incites friendship, but not love; the former is the twin brother of Reverence; the latter is the child of Equality.

Every time that a people which has long crouched in slavery and ignorance is moved to its lowest depths there appear monsters and heroes, prodigies of crime and prodigies of virtue.

Fiction is the microscope of truth.

Habit with it's iron sinews, clasps us and leads us day by day.

There are places and climates, seasons and hours, with their outward circumstance, so much in harmony with certain impressions of the heart, that Nature and the soul of man appear to be parts of one vast whole.

My mother was convinced, and on this head I have retained her firm belief, that to kill animals for the purpose of feeding on their flesh is one of the most deplorable and shameful infirmities of the human state; that it is one of those curses cast upon man either by his fall, or by the obduracy of his own perversity.

Women have much more heart and much more imagination than men; hence, fancy often allures them.

Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.

If God is thy father, human beings are thy brothers and sisters.

The founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of o­ne spiritual empire, that is Muhammed. As regards all standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask, is there any man greater than he?