Alfred de Musset Quotes

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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

Alfred de Musset
The weakness of woman gives to some men a victory that their merit would never gain.

Alfred de Musset
The miser is poor to the extent of all that he has not yet acquired.

Alfred de Musset
To remember — to forget: alas! this is what makes us young or old.

Alfred de Musset
Society, that distills so many poisons, resembles that serpent of India whose abode is the leaf of the plant that cures its bite: society usually offers a remedy for the sufferings it causes.

Alfred de Musset
One loves because he loves: this explanation is, as yet, the most serious and the most decisive that has been found for the solution of this problem.

Alfred de Musset
I am young; I have passed but the half of the road of life, and, already weary, I turn and look back!

Alfred de Musset
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.

Alfred de Musset
O kiss! mysterious beverage that the lips of lovers pour into each other, as into thirsty cups!

Alfred de Musset
Experience is the name men give to their follies, or their sorrows.

Alfred de Musset
The remembrance of the tears I have shed is the only good left me in the world.

Alfred de Musset
To fall in love is not difficult: the difficulty lies in telling it.

Alfred de Musset
Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!

Alfred de Musset
There never has been a nation that has not looked upon woman as the companion or the consolation of man, or as the sacred instrument of his life, and that has not honored her in those characters.

Alfred de Musset
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.

Alfred de Musset
O Love! when thou findest thy true apostles on earth united in kisses, thou commandest their eyelids to close like veils, that they may not see their happiness!

Alfred de Musset
Their avenging God! Rancorous torturer who burns his creatures in slow fire! When they tell me that God made himself a man, I prefer to recognize a man who made himself a god.

Alfred de Musset
Youth and Will may resist excess, but Nature takes revenge in silence.

Alfred de Musset
In love, which is the best rewarded: respect, or certain offenses?

Alfred de Musset
Prospective happiness! it is perhaps the only real happiness in the world.

Alfred de Musset
If love is a play, this play, as old as the world, fiasco or not, it is, all in all, the least bad thing that has so far been found. The roles are trite, I admit, but if the play had no value the whole universe wouldn't know it by heart

Alfred de Musset
Partake of love as a temperate man partakes of wine; do not become intoxicated.

Alfred de Musset
Respect your wife. Heap earth around that flower, but never drop any in the chalice.

Alfred de Musset
Beggars are the vermin that attach themselves to the rich.

Alfred de Musset
I have come too late into a world too old.

Alfred de Musset
Reason! I have lost it; and, were it to be returned to me, I would fly from it!

Alfred de Musset
Very few people know how to enjoy life. Some say to themselves: "I do this or that, therefore I am amused: I have paid so many pieces of gold, hence I feel so much pleasure"; and they wear away their lives on that grindstone.

Alfred de Musset