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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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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
Given
Sprang
True
Fable
Nature
Surrounds
Truth
Fables
Without
Surround
Men
Thus
Created
Doubt

More quotes by Alfred de Vigny

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The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.
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?
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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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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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The events I sought were never as great as I needed them to be.
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 human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.
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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Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?
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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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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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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I love the majesty of human suffering.
Alfred de Vigny
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Invisible is real. Souls have their own world.
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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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
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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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I have a private theory, Sir, that there are no heroes and no monsters in this world. Only children should be allowed to use these words
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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Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.
Alfred de Vigny