Top 500 Alexandre Dumas Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “I acted hastily towards him. Haste is a poor counsellor: I acted wrongly.”

— Alexandre Dumas

452. “One must take the world as one finds it.”

— Alexandre Dumas

453. “You cannot control circumstances, my dear sir; ’man proposes, and God disposes.”

— Alexandre Dumas

454. “Go to the devil with your Latin. Let us drink, my dear d’Artagnan, MORBLEU! Let us drink while the wine is fresh! Let.”

— Alexandre Dumas

455. “Death, according to the care we take to be on good or bad terms with it, is either a friend which will rock us as gently as a nursing mother or an enemy which will savagely tear apart body and soul.”

— Alexandre Dumas

456. “Trust me, do not try to cheapen things; great affairs are badly done with small means.”

— Alexandre Dumas

457. “Nineteen years of light to reflect upon in eternal darkness!”

— Alexandre Dumas

458. “And follow me wherever I go?’ – ‘To the world’s end.”

— Alexandre Dumas

459. “In presence of this ingenuous greatness of soul, Aramis felt himself little. It was the second time he had been compelled to bend before real superiority of heart, much more powerful than splendour of mind.”

— Alexandre Dumas

460. “Your history is quite a romance, and the world, which delights in romances contained in two covers of yellow paper, strangely mistrusts those which are bound in living parchment, even thought they be gilded like yourself.”

— Alexandre Dumas

461. “Let the rich man rediscover the poor one; the free man the pisoner; and the resurrected man the corpse.”

— Alexandre Dumas

462. “He felt he had passed beyond the bounds of vengeance, and that he could no longer say, “God is for and with me.”

— Alexandre Dumas

463. “Pretend to think well of yourself, and the world will think well of you,” an axiom a hundred times more useful in society nowadays than that of the Greeks, “Know thyself,” a knowledge for which, in our days, we have substituted the less difficult and more advantageous science of knowing others.”

— Alexandre Dumas

464. “But he isn’t dead?’ ‘No, he isn’t, as you can very well see. Instead of striking him between the sixth and seventh left rib, as your compatriots usually do, you must have struck higher or lower; and these lawyers, you know, are not easy to kill off.”

— Alexandre Dumas

465. “Why does not God, if he really hates the wicked, as he is said to do, send down brimstone and fire, and consume them altogether?” “You.”

— Alexandre Dumas

466. “Why,’ said he, ’does not the emperor, who has devised so many clever and efficient modes of improving the art of war, organize a regiment of lawyers, judges and legal practitioners, sending them in the hottest fire the enemy could maintain, and using them to save better men?”

— Alexandre Dumas

467. “But why be discouraged? It would be asking too much of Providence if you were to expect to succeed at the first attempt.”

— Alexandre Dumas

468. “A man was lying in the middle of the room, in a circle drawn on the ground with a piece of plaster from the wall, almost naked, his clothes having fallen into tatters. He was drawing very precise geometrical lines in the circle and appeared as absorbed in solving his problem as Archimedes when he was killed by one of Marcellus’ soldiers.”

— Alexandre Dumas

469. “After which, satisfied with the way he had conducted himself at Meung, free of remorse for the past, confident in the present, and full of hope for the future, he went to bed and slept the sleep of the just.”

— Alexandre Dumas

470. “Madame,” said the doctor, “they are not your enemies, but you are the enemy of the human race: nobody can think without, horror of your crimes.”

— Alexandre Dumas

471. “At bottom the character of M. Bonacieux was one of profound selfishness mixed with sordid avarice, the whole seasoned with extreme cowardice.”

— Alexandre Dumas

472. “He told himself that it was the hatred of men, not the vengeance of God, which had plunged him into the abyss where he now found himself.”

— Alexandre Dumas

473. “My commands are ordinarily short, clear, and precise; and I would rather be obliged to repeat my words twice, or even three times, than they should be misunderstood.”

— Alexandre Dumas

474. “D’Artagnan is right,” said Athos. “Behold our three leaves of absence, which come from M. de Treville; and here are three hundred pistoles, which come from I know not where. Let us go and be killed where we are told to go. Is life worth so many questions? D’Artagnan, I am ready to follow you.”

— Alexandre Dumas

475. “Lucullus dines with Lucullus,’ that is quite sufficient.”

— Alexandre Dumas

476. “Punctuality,” said Monte Cristo, “is the politeness of kings, according to one of your sovereigns, I think; but it is not the same with travellers. However, I hope you will excuse the two or three seconds I am behindhand; five hundred leagues are not to be accomplished without some trouble, and especially in France, where, it seems, it is forbidden to beat the postilions.”

— Alexandre Dumas

477. “Sir, you are punctual, and I cannot complain that you have broken your promise; but oh, how the time has dragged, and how long it has seemed before the clock struck six!”

— Alexandre Dumas

478. “One could guess that there was the delicate forethought of a mother behind this choice of the pavillon for Albert: while not wanting to be separated from her son, she nevertheless realized that a young man of the viscount’s age needed all his freedom. On the other hand, it must be said that one could also recognize in this the intelligent egoism of the young man, the son of wealthy parents, who enjoyed the benefits of a free and idle life, which was gilded for him like a birdcage.”

— Alexandre Dumas

479. “Die! No, no!’ He cried. ‘It was not worth living so long, and suffering so much, to die now. Death was welcome previously when I made a resolution to meet it, many years ago. But now it would truly be conceding too much to my miserable fate. No, I want to live, I want to struggle to the end. No, I want to recover the happiness that has been taken away from me. I am forgetting that, before I die, I have my enemies to punish and, who knows? – perhaps a few friends to reward.”

— Alexandre Dumas

480. “Did you not hear what I said, sir? I told you there was fire in my sentence. And though it is only after death that my body is to be burnt, it will always be a terrible disgrace on my memory. I am saved the pain of being burnt alive, and thus, perhaps, saved from a death of despair, but the shamefulness is the same, and it is that I think of.”

— Alexandre Dumas

481. “Like all primitive natures, she adored everything that appealed to her eyes and her ears.”

— Alexandre Dumas

482. “Tigers and crocodiles with two legs are more dangerous than the rest.”

— Alexandre Dumas

483. “Oh Heaven! You sometimes bear with such injustice on earth, that I understand why there are wretches who doubt in your existence.”

— Alexandre Dumas

484. “And without waiting for the answer of the newcomer to this proof of affection, M. de Treville seized his right hand and pressed it with all his might, without perceiving that Athos, whatever might be his self-command, allowed a slight murmur of pain to escape him, and if possible, grew paler than he was before.”

— Alexandre Dumas

485. “The poison employed by Sainte-Croix has been tried in all the ways, and can defy every experiment. This poison floats in water, it is the superior, and the water obeys it; it escapes in the trial by fire, leaving behind only innocent deposits; in animals it is so skilfully concealed that no one could detect it; all parts of the animal remain healthy and active; even while it is spreading the cause of death, this artificial poison leaves behind the marks and appearance of life.”

— Alexandre Dumas

486. “There is something so awe-inspiring in great afflictions that even in the worst times the first emotion of a crowd has generally been to sympathise with the sufferer in a great catastrophe.”

— Alexandre Dumas

487. “Now, I cannot for one instant believe you so devoid of gallantry as to refuse a lady your escort when she even condescends to ask you for it.”

— Alexandre Dumas

488. “Paid the last debt of nature.”

— Alexandre Dumas

489. “At the end of every prayer introduced the entreaty oftener addressed to man than to God: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.” Yet in spite of his earnest prayers, Dantes remained a prisoner.”

— Alexandre Dumas

490. “All earthly ills yield to two all-potent remedies, time and silence.”

— Alexandre Dumas

491. “She was in tears; and, strange as it was, in spite of the emotions he felt at the sight of these tears, he looked also at Madame de Villefort, and it appeared to him as if a slight gloomy smile had passed over her thin lips, like those meteors which are seen passing inauspiciously between two clouds in a stormy sky.”

— Alexandre Dumas

492. “The night was shining with stars. They were at the top of the Montee de Villedjuif, on the plateau from which Paris is a dark sea shimmering with millions of lights like phosphorescent waves; and waves they are, more thunderous, more passionate, more shifting, more furious and more greedy than those of the stormy ocean, waves which never experience the tranquility of a vast sea, but constantly pound together, ever foaming and engulfing everything!”

— Alexandre Dumas

493. “The softness of your voice covers the hardness of your words. You speak of sacrilege, but the sacrilege is in the separation of hearts that God has formed for each other!”

— Alexandre Dumas

494. “A man is always endowed by Heaven with too much for his own happiness, and just enough to make him miserable.”

— Alexandre Dumas

495. “Before one is afraid, one sees clearly; while one is afraid, one sees double; and after being afraid, one sees dimly.”

— Alexandre Dumas

496. “Oui, ma fille, dit Monte Cristo ; tu sais bien que ce n’est jamais moi qui te quitterai. Ce n’est point l’arbre qui quitte la fleur, c’est la fleur qui quitte l’arbre.”

— Alexandre Dumas

497. “And that you alone, among the men whom you do not recognize as your brothers- for you have said so,” observed Villefort, in a tone that faltered somewhat- “you alone are perfect.”

— Alexandre Dumas

498. “Well, monsieur, I am suffering at this moment something strange, and that is the satisfaction of despair. There is in certain souls – and I have just discovered that mine is of the number – a real satisfaction in the assurance that all is lost, and the time is come to yield.”

— Alexandre Dumas

499. “Then, casting a glance on the handsome young man, who was scarcely twenty-five years of age, and whom he was leaving in his gore, deprived of sense and perhaps dead, he gave a sigh for that unaccountable destiny which leads men to destroy each other for the interests of people who are strangers to them and who often do not even know that they exist.”

— Alexandre Dumas

500. “God wills it that man whom he has created, and in whose heart he has so profoundly rooted the love of life, should do all in his power to preserve that existence, which, however painful it may be, is yet always so dear.”

— Alexandre Dumas