Alfred de Vigny Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

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

Alfred de Vigny
Actors are lucky, they have glory without responsibility.

Alfred de Vigny
History is a novel whose author is the people.

Alfred de Vigny
I love the sound of the horn, at night, in the depth of the woods.

Alfred de Vigny
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?

Alfred de Vigny
A book is a bottle cast upon the high seas on which this label must be placed: Catch who can!

Alfred de Vigny
A book is a bottle thrown into the sea on which this label should be attached: Catch as catch can.

Alfred de Vigny
Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.

Alfred de Vigny
Silence alone is great; all else is feebleness…then as do I, say naught, but suffer and die.

Alfred de Vigny
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.

Alfred de Vigny
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.

Alfred de Vigny
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.

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

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

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

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

Alfred de Vigny
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.

Alfred de Vigny
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.

Alfred de Vigny
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?

Alfred de Vigny
God! how sad is the sound of the horn deep in the woods!

Alfred de Vigny
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.

Alfred de Vigny
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.

Alfred de Vigny
Clamor can be stifled, but how avenge oneself on silence?

Alfred de Vigny
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.

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

Alfred de Vigny
The soldier's lot is the most melancholy relic of barbarism (next to capital punishment) that lingers on among mankind.

Alfred de Vigny
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.

Alfred de Vigny
Those intellectuals are our natural enemies; the only kind who are worth anything are the musicians and the dancers: they don't insult anybody with their performances, and they neither sing nor dance politics. So I like them; but don't let me hear a word about the rest.

Alfred de Vigny