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

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

More quotes by Alfred de Vigny

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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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The true God, the mighty God, is the God of ideas.
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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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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
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We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements.
Alfred de Vigny
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What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?
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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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Greatness is the dream of youth realized in old age.
Alfred de Vigny
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The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.
Alfred de Vigny
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I love the majesty of human suffering.
Alfred de Vigny
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Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.
Alfred de Vigny
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Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.
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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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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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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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
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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.
Alfred de Vigny
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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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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