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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
Always
Fame
Coincidences
Men
Circumstances
Tossed
Hold
Idiots
Bring
Confess
Greatest
Manipulate
Power
Coincidence
Together
Idiot
Even
Meant
More quotes by 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
Poetry is the disease of the brain.
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
The loveliest Muse in the world does not feed her owner these girls make fine mistresses but terrible wives
Alfred de Vigny
Greatness is the dream of youth realized in old age.
Alfred de Vigny
The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.
Alfred de Vigny
What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?
Alfred de Vigny
The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.
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
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
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
But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
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
We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements.
Alfred de Vigny
On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.
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
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
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
The events I sought were never as great as I needed them to be.
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
