Top 500 Alexandre Dumas Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “My son, be worthy of your noble name, worthily borne by your ancestors for over five hundred years. Remember it’s by courage, and courage alone, that a nobleman makes his way nowadays. Don’t be afraid of opportunities, and seek out adventures. My son, all I have to give you is fifteen ecus, my horse, and the advice you’ve just heard. Make the most of these gifts, and have a long, happy life.”

— Alexandre Dumas

102. “Is not a day divided into twenty-four hours, each hour into sixty minutes, and every minute sub-divided into sixty seconds? Now in 86,400 seconds many things can be done.”

— Alexandre Dumas

103. “Life is no more than the repeated fulfilling of a permanent desire.”

— Alexandre Dumas

104. “It is only the dead who do not return.”

— Alexandre Dumas

105. “People ask for advice only in order not to follow it; or, if they follow it, in order to have someone to blame for giving it.”

— Alexandre Dumas

106. “Men’s minds are raised to the level of the women with whom they associate.”

— Alexandre Dumas

107. “The king! I thought he was philosopher enough to allow that there was no murder in politics. In politics, my dear fellow, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but ideas – no feelings, but interests; in politics we do not kill a man, we only remove an obstacle, that is all.”

— Alexandre Dumas

108. “A good deed is never lost.”

— Alexandre Dumas

109. “I have heard it said that the dead have never done, in six thousand years, as much evil as the living do in a single day.”

— Alexandre Dumas

110. “Admire yourself and others will admire you’, a hundred times more useful in our days than the Greek one: ‘Know thyself’, which has now been replaced by the less demanding and more profitable art of knowing others.”

— Alexandre Dumas

111. “To despise flowers is to offend God.”

— Alexandre Dumas

112. “Todo mal tienes dos remedios; el tiempo y el silencio.”

— Alexandre Dumas

113. “Chaque homme a sa passion qui le mord au fond du coeur, comme chaque fruit son ver.”

— Alexandre Dumas

114. “There are, indeed, some things which appear so impossible that the mind does not dwell on them for an instant.”

— Alexandre Dumas

115. “Do not give me more credit than I deserve, and you will never have to revise your first impression of me.”

— Alexandre Dumas

116. “Compression is needed to explode gunpowder.”

— Alexandre Dumas

117. “Darling, replied Valentine, has not the count just told us that all human wisdom was contained in these two words,- “Wait and hope”?”

— Alexandre Dumas

118. “I, who have also been betrayed, assassinated and cast into a tomb, I have emerged from that tomb by the grace of God and I owe it to God to take my revenge. He has sent me for that purpose. Here I am.”

— Alexandre Dumas

119. “Hatred is blind and anger deaf: the one who pours himself a cup of vengeance is likely to drink a bitter draught.”

— Alexandre Dumas

120. “Danaro e santita, Meta della meta.”

— Alexandre Dumas

121. “For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God.”

— Alexandre Dumas

122. “It is rare that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.”

— Alexandre Dumas

123. “What I’ve loved most after you, is myself: that is, my dignity and that strength which made me superior to other men. That Strength was my life. You’ve broken it with a word, so I must die.”

— Alexandre Dumas

124. “Let me struggle like a woman- my strength lies in my weakness. – Milady.”

— Alexandre Dumas

125. “Yet what is expectation but a kind of folly, and what is that folly but an excess of hope?”

— Alexandre Dumas

126. “In every country where independence has taken the place of liberty, the first desire of a manly heart is to possess a weapon which at once renders him capable of defence or attack, and, by rendering its owner fearsome, makes him feared.”

— Alexandre Dumas

127. “I have to admit,’ replied Villefort, looking at his father with astonishment, ‘you seem very well informed.’ ‘Heavens, it’s simple enough. You people, who hold power, have only what can be bought for money; we, who are waiting to gain power, have what is given out of devotion.’ ‘Devotion?’ Villefort laughed. ‘Yes, devotion. That is the honest way to describe ambition when it has expectations.”

— Alexandre Dumas

128. “Youth is a flower of which love is the fruit; happy is he who, after facing watched its silent growth, is permitted to gather and call it his own.”

— Alexandre Dumas

129. “When you return to this mundane sphere from your visionary world, you would seem to leave a Neapolitan spring for a Lapland winter – to quit paradise for earth – heaven for hell! Taste the hashish, guest of mine – taste the hashish.”

— Alexandre Dumas

130. “I have forgiven the world for the love of you;.”

— Alexandre Dumas

131. “He decided it was human hatred and not divine vengeance that had plunged him into this abyss. He doomed these unknown men to every torment that his inflamed imagination could devise, while still considering that the most frightful were too mild and, above all, too brief for them: torture was followed by death, and death brought, if not repose, at least an insensibility that resembled it.”

— Alexandre Dumas

132. “Chi ha compagno ha padrone – ‘He who has a partner has a master.”

— Alexandre Dumas

133. “He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must of felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.”

— Alexandre Dumas

134. “Often we pass beside happiness without seeing it, without looking at it, or even if we have seen and looked at it, without recognizing it.”

— Alexandre Dumas

135. “An all-wise Providence permits not sinners to escape thus easily from the punishment they have merited on earth, but reserves them to aid his own designs, using them as instruments whereby to work his vengeance on the guilty.”

— Alexandre Dumas

136. “A young man – we can sketch his portrait at a dash. Imagine to yourself a Don Quixote of eighteen; a Don Quixote without his corselet, without his coat of mail, without his cuisses; a Don Quixote clothed in a woolen doublet, the blue color of which had faded into a nameless shade between lees of wine and a heavenly azure; face long and brown;.”

— Alexandre Dumas

137. “For there are two distinct sorts of ideas: Those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart.”

— Alexandre Dumas

138. “Oh, mankind, race of crocodiles! How well I recognize you down there, and how worthy you are of yourselves!”

— Alexandre Dumas

139. “Live, for a day will come when you will be happy and bless life.”

— Alexandre Dumas

140. “It is the infirmity of our nature always to believe ourselves much more unhappy than those who groan by our sides!”

— Alexandre Dumas

141. “I do as I please, Monsieur Beauchamp, and believe me, what I do is always well done.”

— Alexandre Dumas

142. “When I think of you my heart beats fast, the blood burns in my veins and I can hardly breathe.”

— Alexandre Dumas

143. “Danglars was one of those men born with a pen behind the ear, and an inkstand in place of a heart. Everything with him was multiplication or subtraction. The life of a man was to him of far less value than a numeral, especially when, by taking it away, he could increase the sum total of his own desires.”

— Alexandre Dumas

144. “Danglars was one of those men born with a pen behind the ear, and an ink-stand in place of a heart. Everything with him was multiplication or subtraction, and he estimated the life of a man as less precious than a figure, when that figure could increase, and the life would diminish, the total of the amount.”

— Alexandre Dumas

145. “The air in Provence is impregnated with the aroma of garlic, which makes it very healthful to breathe.”

— Alexandre Dumas

146. “Pain, anguish and suffering in human life are always in proportion to the strength with which a man is endowed.”

— Alexandre Dumas

147. “Now I’d like someone to tell me there is no drama in real life!”

— Alexandre Dumas

148. “But excessive grief is like a storm at sea, where the frail bark is tossed from the depths to the top of the wave.”

— Alexandre Dumas

149. “There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living.”

— Alexandre Dumas

150. “Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.”

— Alexandre Dumas