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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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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
Capital
Punishment
Soldier
Conflict
Among
Vestige
Existence
Grievous
War
Survives
Next
Barbarism

More quotes by Alfred de Vigny

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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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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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Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.
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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.
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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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What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?
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We shall find in our troubled hearts, where discord reigns, two needs which seem at variance, but which merge, as I think, in a common source - the love of the true, and the love of the fabulous.
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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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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.
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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.
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Hope is the biggest of our foolish things.
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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.
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The events I sought were never as great as I needed them to be.
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What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?
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The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.
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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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Only silence is great all else is weakness.
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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.
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On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.
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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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