Quotes from Alfred de Vigny

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

À voir ce que l'on fut sur terre et ce qu'on laisse Seul le silence est grand; tout le reste est faiblesse.

Silence alone is great; all else is weakness.

La vie est trop courte pour que nous en perdions une part précieuse à nous contrefaire.

What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I love the majesty of human suffering.

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

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

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

What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?

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

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

Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.

Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

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.

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.

The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.