Quote

A calm despair, without angry convulsions or reproaches directed at heaven, is the essence of wisdom.

Alfred de Vigny

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Wisdom
Reproaches
Heaven
Resignation
Without
Reproach
Directed
Calm
Despair
Angry
Essence
Convulsions

More quotes by Alfred de Vigny

Image
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
Image
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
Image
What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?
Alfred de Vigny
Image
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
Image
History is a novel for which the people is the author.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What is a great life if not a youthful idea executed by a man of mature years.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
An army is a nation within a nation, it is one of the vices of courage.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
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
Image
What is a great life? It is the dreams of youth realised in old age.
Alfred de Vigny
Image
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
Image
The loveliest Muse in the world does not feed her owner these girls make fine mistresses but terrible wives
Alfred de Vigny
Image
Poetry is the disease of the brain.
Alfred de Vigny