Quotes from Alexandre Dumas

Darling, has not the count just told us that all human wisdom is summed up in two words? Wait and hope.

The heart breaks when it has swelled too much in the warm breath of hope, then finds itself enclosed in cold reality.

I'm not proud, but I'm happy, and I think happiness makes a man even blinder than pride.

A man is always in a hurry to be happy.

On the 24th of February, 1810, the look-out at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.

D'Artagnan ran home immediately, and although it was three o'clock in the morning and he had some of the worst quarters of Paris to traverse, he met with no misadventure. Everyone knows that drunkards and lovers have a protecting deity.

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

let us call on M. de Monte Cristo; he is admirably adapted to revive one's spirits, because he never interrogates, and in my opinion those who ask no questions are the best comforters.

When you are in doubt as to which you should serve forsake the material appearance for the invisible principle for this is everything.

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.

It was clear that Mme Danglars was suffering from one of those nervous irritations which women are often unable to explain even to themselves.

I have forgiven the world for the love of you;

I'd rather have ten soldiers to guard than a single scholar.

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

Happiness even makes the wicked good.

Celui-la seul qui a eprouve l'extreme infortune est apte a ressentir l'extreme felicite. Il faut avoir voulu mourir pour savoir combien el est bon de vivre.

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.

To despise flowers is to offend God.

The King! I thought him enough of a philosopher to realize that there is no such thing as murder in politics. You know as well as I do, my dear boy, that in politics there are no people, only ideas; no feelings, only interests. In politics, you don't kill a man, you remove an obstacle, that's all.

Drunk, if you like; so much the worse for those who fear wine, for it is because they have bad thoughts which they are afraid the liquor will extract from their hearts; and Caderousse began to sing the two last lines of a song very popular at the time, —

Sometimes salvation is found in agony.

You instinctively display the greatest virtue, or rather the chief defect, of us eccentric Parisians- that is, you assume the vices you have not, and conceal the virtues you possess.

the greater number of a man's errors come before him disguised under the specious form of necessity; then, after error has been committed in a moment of excitement, of delirium, or of fear, we see that we might have avoided and escaped it.

what is life? Is it not a hall in Death's anteroom?