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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

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Alfred de Vigny
Age: 66 †
Born: 1797
Born: March 27
Died: 1863
Died: September 17
Diarist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
Writer
Alfred Victor de Vigny
Alfred Victor
comte de Vigny
Men
Circumstances
Tossed
Hold
Idiots
Bring
Confess
Greatest
Manipulate
Power
Coincidence
Together
Idiot
Even
Meant
Always
Fame
Coincidences

More quotes by Alfred de Vigny

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A calm despair, without angry convulsions or reproaches directed at heaven, is the essence of wisdom.
Alfred de Vigny
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What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?
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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
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Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.
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What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?
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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
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The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.
Alfred de Vigny
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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
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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
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Honour is manly decency. The shame of being found wanting in it means everything to us. Is this, then, the indefinable, the sacred thing?
Alfred de Vigny
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The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.
Alfred de Vigny
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But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
Alfred de Vigny
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Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.
Alfred de Vigny
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On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.
Alfred de Vigny
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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
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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
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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?
Alfred de Vigny
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The events I sought were never as great as I needed them to be.
Alfred de Vigny
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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
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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