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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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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
Reproduction
Imitation
Arts
Use
Art
Life

More quotes by Alfred de Vigny

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I love the majesty of human suffering.
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.
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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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What is a great life? It is the dreams of youth realised in old age.
Alfred de Vigny
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Hope is the biggest of our foolish things.
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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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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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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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
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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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The true God, the mighty God, is the God of ideas.
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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What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?
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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Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?
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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Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.
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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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
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Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.
Alfred de Vigny