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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
Power
Coincidence
Together
Idiot
Even
Meant
Always
Fame
Coincidences
Men
Circumstances
Tossed
Hold
Idiots
Bring
Confess
Greatest
Manipulate
More quotes by Alfred de Vigny
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.
Alfred de Vigny
Perform your long and heavy task with energy, treading the path to which Fate has been pleased to call you.
Alfred de Vigny
What is a great life if not a youthful idea executed by a man of mature years.
Alfred de Vigny
Only silence is great all else is weakness.
Alfred de Vigny
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
The events I sought were never as great as I needed them to be.
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
Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?
Alfred de Vigny
What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?
Alfred de Vigny
Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.
Alfred de Vigny
Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?
Alfred de Vigny
Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.
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
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
Silence alone is great all else is feebleness . . . Perform with all your heart your long and heavy task. . . . Then as do I, say naught, but suffer and die.
Alfred de Vigny
The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.
Alfred de Vigny
Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.
Alfred de Vigny
An army is a nation within a nation, it is one of the vices of courage.
Alfred de Vigny
Doubt is the freedom of thought. Any claim to truth can be doubted.
Alfred de Vigny
History is a novel for which the people is the author.
Alfred de Vigny
