Quotes from Alexandre Dumas

We are often criminals in the eyes of the earth, not only for having committed crimes, but because we know that crimes have been committed.

Do you know what you have done, wise as you are? I have waited a month, which means I have suffered a month. I hoped-man is such a poor and miserable creature-I hoped, for what? I don't know: something unimaginable, absurd, senseless, a miracle...but what? God alone knows, for it was He who diluted our reason with that madness called hope.

Never did a man, so deeply in love, allow the clocks to go on peacefully.

Va, mon enfant, dit le vieux Dantès, et que Dieu te bénisse dans ta femme comme il m'a béni dans mon fils.

terror, and clinging with her hands to the wall to avoid falling. Every one drew back, and the man in the red cloak remained standing alone in the middle of the room. Oh, grace, grace, pardon! cried the wretch, falling on her knees. The unknown waited for silence, and then resumed, I told you well that she would know

it means resignation, madam, the first of all the virtues.

Lebt wohl, Güte, Menschenfreundlichkeit, Dankbarkeit... lebt wohl, ihr sämtlichen Gefühle, die das Herz aufgehen lassen! Ich habe mich an die Stelle der Vorsehung gesetzt, um die Guten zu belohnen... Jetzt möge der Gott der Rache mir sein Amt abtreten, um die Bösen zu bestrafen!

Seventeen months captivity to a sailor accustomed to the boundless ocean, is a worse punishment than human crime ever merited.

When you wish to obtain some concession from a man's self-love, you must avoid even the appearance of wishing to wound it.

Insensato! - exclamou para consigo - No dia em que resolvera vingar-me deixei que me arrancassem o coração!

Do not always brood over what is impossible, or you will be mad in a fortnight.

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.

Hasty actions are generally bad ones.

this is the first part of this precious manuscript

How odd and inexplicable are the paths of destiny. What intention did Providence have by ruining the one who it has raised up, and raising up the one who it has ruined?

There is neither happiness nor misfortune in this world, there is merely the comparison between one state and another, nothing more.

Very well," replied M. Danglars, who had listened to all this preamble with imperturbable coolness, but without understanding a word, engaged as he was, like every man burdened with thoughts of the past, and seeking the thread of his own ideas in those of the speaker.

I have come from a planet called sorrow.

E tudo isso, meu Deus, porque o meu coração, que julgava morto, só estava adormecido; porque ele acordou, porque ele bateu, porque cedi à dor desse pulsar arrancado do fundo do meu peito pela voz de uma mulher.

to learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other." "But cannot one learn philosophy?

But tell me," said Beauchamp, "what is life? Is it not a hall in Death's anteroom?

To no class of persons is the presentation of a gratuitous opera-box more acceptable than to the wealthy millionaire, who still hugs economy while boasting of carrying a king's ransom in his waistcoat pocket.

the farthest angle from the second opening

I have descended from a planet, called grief.