Alfred de Vigny Quotes

42 quotes in 664 categories

• Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?
• Silence alone is great; all else is feebleness . . . Perform with all your heart your long and heavy task. . . . Then…
• An army is a nation within a nation, it is one of the vices of courage.
• What is a great life if not a youthful idea executed by a man of mature years.
• The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.
• Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.
• Doubt is the freedom of thought. Any claim to truth can be doubted.
• Do you know that charming part of our country which has been called the garden of France - that spot where, amid verdant plains watered…
• 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…
• I love the majesty of human suffering.
• On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.
• 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…
• The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.
• 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…
• Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?
• History is a novel for which the people is the author.
• The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.
• I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and…
• 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…
• But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

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