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On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.

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
Stories
Men
Life
Told
Story
Born
History

More quotes by Alfred de Vigny

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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.
Alfred de Vigny
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Doubt is the freedom of thought. Any claim to truth can be doubted.
Alfred de Vigny
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What is a great life if not a youthful idea executed by a man of mature years.
Alfred de Vigny
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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
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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.
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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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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Poetry is the disease of the brain.
Alfred de Vigny
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What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?
Alfred de Vigny
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Hope is the biggest of our foolish things.
Alfred de Vigny
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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.
Alfred de Vigny
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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.
Alfred de Vigny
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A calm despair, without angry convulsions or reproaches directed at heaven, is the essence of wisdom.
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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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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Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?
Alfred de Vigny
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The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds
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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The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.
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.
Alfred de Vigny