Top 40 Alfred de Vigny Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “History is a novel for which the people is the author.”

— Alfred de Vigny

2. “Only silence is great; all else is weakness.”

— Alfred de Vigny

3. “Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.”

— Alfred de Vigny

4. “Perform your long and heavy task with energy, treading the path to which Fate has been pleased to call you.”

— Alfred de Vigny

5. “Hope is the greatest madness. What can we expect of a world that we enter with the assurance of seeing our fathers and mothers die? A world where, if two beings love each other and give their lives to each other, both can be sure that one will watch the other perish?”

— Alfred de Vigny

6. “We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements.”

— Alfred de Vigny

7. “On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.”

— Alfred de Vigny

8. “What is a great life? It is the dreams of youth realised in old age.”

— Alfred de Vigny

9. “Hope is the biggest of our foolish things.”

— Alfred de Vigny

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

— Alfred de Vigny

11. “Invisible is real. Souls have their own world.”

— Alfred de Vigny

12. “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

13. “The true God, the mighty God, is the God of ideas.”

— Alfred de Vigny

14. “What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?”

— Alfred de Vigny

15. “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

16. “But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.”

— Alfred de Vigny

17. “I love the majesty of human suffering.”

— Alfred de Vigny

18. “An army is a nation within a nation, it is one of the vices of courage.”

— Alfred de Vigny

19. “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

20. “The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.”

— Alfred de Vigny

21. “Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.”

— Alfred de Vigny

22. “Doubt is the freedom of thought. Any claim to truth can be doubted.”

— Alfred de Vigny

23. “History is a novel whose author is the people.”

— Alfred de Vigny

24. “Poetry is the disease of the brain.”

— Alfred de Vigny

25. “The loveliest Muse in the world does not feed her owner; these girls make fine mistresses but terrible wives.”

— Alfred de Vigny

26. “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

27. “Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.”

— Alfred de Vigny

28. “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

29. “We shall find in our troubled hearts, where discord reigns, two needs which seem at variance, but which merge, as I think, in a common source – the love of the true, and the love of the fabulous.”

— Alfred de Vigny

30. “Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?”

— Alfred de Vigny

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?”

— Alfred de Vigny

36. “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

37. “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

38. “What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?”

— Alfred de Vigny

39. “The events I sought were never as great as I needed them to be.”

— Alfred de Vigny

40. “The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.”

— Alfred de Vigny

41. “Oh, I have a habit of letting myself be lectured on the things I know best. I like to see if they are understood in the same way I understand; for there are many ways of knowing the same thing.”

— Alfred de Vigny

42. “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

43. “The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.”

— Alfred de Vigny

44. “Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?”

— Alfred de Vigny

45. “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