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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
Life
Reproduction
Imitation
Arts
Use
Art

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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What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?
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The events I sought were never as great as I needed them to be.
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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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Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.
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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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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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Poetry is the disease of the brain.
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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.
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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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The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.
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Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?
Alfred de Vigny
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Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.
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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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
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Perform your long and heavy task with energy, treading the path to which Fate has been pleased to call you.
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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History is a novel for which the people is the author.
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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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