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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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On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.
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Only silence is great all else is weakness.
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Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?
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Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.
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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.
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The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.
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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?
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Invisible is real. Souls have their own world.
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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?
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Poetry is the disease of the brain.
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Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.
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The events I sought were never as great as I needed them to be.
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The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.
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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
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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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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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The loveliest Muse in the world does not feed her owner these girls make fine mistresses but terrible wives
Alfred de Vigny
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Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?
Alfred de Vigny
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I love the majesty of human suffering.
Alfred de Vigny
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History is a novel for which the people is the author.
Alfred de Vigny