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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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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
World
Hope
Expect
Lives
Beings
Father
Watches
Perish
Mother
Watch
Assurance
Two
Greatest
Fathers
Give
Seeing
Mothers
Giving
Sure
Enter
Love
Dies
Madness

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Perform your long and heavy task with energy, treading the path to which Fate has been pleased to call you.
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We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements.
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The true God, the mighty God, is the God of ideas.
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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
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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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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
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What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?
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What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?
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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?
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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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Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.
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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.
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Hope is the biggest of our foolish things.
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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.
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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.
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Poetry is the disease of the brain.
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The loveliest Muse in the world does not feed her owner these girls make fine mistresses but terrible wives
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Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?
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