Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Events
Advance
Values
Total
Rather
Individuals
Less
Details
Carries
Individual
Noble
Carrie
Care
Complete
Indifferent
Real
Civilization
Cares
Along
Grand

More quotes by Alfred de Vigny

Image
What is a great life if not a youthful idea executed by a man of mature years.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
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
Image
The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
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
Image
An army is a nation within a nation, it is one of the vices of courage.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
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
Image
I love the majesty of human suffering.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
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
Image
Perform your long and heavy task with energy, treading the path to which Fate has been pleased to call you.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
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.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
The true God, the mighty God, is the God of ideas.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
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
Image
What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?
Alfred de Vigny
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.
Alfred de Vigny