Alfred de Musset > Quotes

“How glorious it is – and also how painful – to be an exception. ”
― Alfred de Musset

“You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep”
― Alfred De Musset, Lorenzaccio

“Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives”
― Alfred De Musset

“Man is a pupil, pain is his teacher.”
― Alfred de Musset

“I don't know where my road is going, but I know that I walk better when I hold your hand.”
― Alfred de Musset

“Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!”
― Alfred De Musset, Fantasio

“life is a deep sleep of which love is the dream”
― Alfred De Musset

“In my flowery dreams there's always you. I do not regret it one bit.”
― Alred De Musset

“L'homme est un apprenti, la douleur est son maître. Et nul ne se connaît tant qu'il n'a pas souffert. C'est une dure loi, mais une loi suprême, vieille comme le monde et la fatalité, qu'il nous faut du malheur recevoir le baptême et qu'à ce triste prix tout doit être acheté...”
― Alfred de Musset

“What I need is a woman who is something, anything: either very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something.”
― Alfred De Musset, A Selection From The Poetry And Comedies Of Alfred De Musset

“A happy memory is perhaps on this earth truer than happiness itself.”
― Alfred de Musset

“I deeply wished I could make the stars all come down and breathe them; disappear in them”
― Alfred de Musset

“J'ai perdu ma force et ma vie,
Et mes amis et ma gaieté;
J'ai perdu jusqu'à la fierté
Qui faisait croire à mon génie.

Quand j'ai connu la Vérité,
J'ai cru que c'était une amie ;
Quand je l'ai comprise et sentie,
J'en étais déjà dégoûté.

Et pourtant elle est éternelle,
Et ceux qui se sont passés d'elle
Ici-bas ont tout ignoré.

Dieu parle, il faut qu'on lui réponde.
Le seul bien qui me reste au monde
Est d'avoir quelquefois pleuré.”
― Alfred De Musset

“Tous les hommes sont menteurs, inconstants, faux, bavards, hypocrites, orgueilleux et lâches, méprisables et sensuels ; toutes les femmes sont perfides, artificieuses, vaniteuses, curieuses et dépravées ; le monde n'est qu'un égout sans fond où les phoques les plus informes rampent et se tordent sur des montagnes de fange ; mais il y a au monde une chose sainte et sublime, c'est l'union de deux de ces êtres si imparfaits et si affreux. On est souvent trompé en amour, souvent blessé et souvent malheureux ; mais on aime, et quand on est sur le bord de sa tombe, on se retourne pour regarder en arrière ; et on se dit : " J'ai souffert souvent, je me suis trompé quelquefois, mais j'ai aimé. C'est moi qui ai vécu, et non pas un être factice créé par mon orgueil et mon ennui.”
― Alfred de Musset, On ne badine pas avec l'amour

“The heart that once has been your shrine for other loves is too divine”
― Alfred De Musset

“Poets represent love as sculptors design beauty, as musicians create melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization, they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life, the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature. There lived, it is said, at Athens a great number of beautiful girls; Praxiteles drew them all one after another; then from these diverse types of beauty, each one of which had its defects, he formed a single faultless beauty and created Venus. The man who first created a musical instrument, and who gave to harmony its rules and its laws, had for a long time listened to the murmuring of reeds and the singing of birds. Thus the poets, who understand life, after knowing much of love, more or less transitory, after feeling that sublime exaltation which real passion can for the moment inspire, eliminating from human nature all that degrades it, created the mysterious names which through the ages fly from lip to lip: Daphnis and Chloe, Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe.

To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is but to seek on public squares a woman such as Venus, or to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.”
― Alfred De Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century

“What a frightful weapon is human thought! It is our defense and our safeguard, the most precious gift that God has made us. It is ours and it obeys us; we may launch it forth into space, but, once outside of our feeble brains, it is gone; we can no longer control it. ”
― Alfred De Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century

“There are temptations more attractive than angels. Liberty, Patriotism, the good of humanity – words like that are the silver scales of the Tempter’s flaming wings”
― Alfred De Musset, Lorenzaccio

“Look at the sun! It’s dry, it’s dead, it needs a drink, it wants blood! And I’ll give it blood!”
― Alfred De Musset, Lorenzaccio

“The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer”
― Alfred De Musset, Lorenzaccio

“Is is true that dictators never dream because they can change their smallest fantasies into realities if they want to?”
― Alfred De Musset, Lorenzaccio

“Your name, merely your name, floods my brain to a point of sweet disgust.”
― Alfred De Musset

“Nothing is a sin when you obey the orders of a priest”
― Alfred De Musset, Lorenzaccio

“If love is a play, this play, as old as the world, fiasco or not, it is, all in all, the least bad thing that has so far been found. The roles are trite, I admit, but if the play had no value the whole universe wouldn’t know it by heart”
― Alfred De Musset, Fantasio

“All men are liars, inconstant, hollow, talkative, hypocrites, proud and cowards, contemptible and sensual; all woman are perfidious, artificial, vain, curious and depraved; the world is nothing but a bottomless sewer where the most shapeless seals crawl and wriggle on mountains of muck; but there one single thing in this world, saint and sublime, it’s the union of these two beings so imperfect and dreadful. We are often deceived in love, often wounded and often miserable; but we love, and when we are on of the verge of the grave, we look back, and we say: I often suffered, I erred sometimes: but I loved. It is me who lived and not a factitious being created by my pride and my boredom.”
― Alfred Musset (de), On ne badine pas avec l'amour

“It is unfortunately true that there is in blasphemy a certain outlet which solaces the burdened heart. When an atheist, drawing his watch, gave God a quarter of an hour in which to strike him dead, it is certain that it was a quarter of an hour of wrath and of atrocious joy. It was the paroxysm of despair, a nameless appeal to all celestial powers; it was a poor, wretched creature squirming under the foot that was crushing him; it was a loud cry of pain. Who knows? In the eyes of Him who sees all things, it was perhaps a prayer. ”
― Alfred De Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century

“A Mademoiselle
Oui, femmes, quoi qu'on puisse dire,
Vous avez le fatal pouvoir
De nous jeter par un sourire Dans l'ivresse ou le désespoir. Oui, deux mots, le silence même,
Un regard distrait ou moqueur,
Peuvent donner à qui vous aime
Un coup de poignard dans le coeur. Oui, votre orgueil doit être immense,
Car, grâce à notre lâcheté,
Rien n'égale votre puissance,
Sinon votre fragilité. Mais toute puissance sur terre
Meurt quand l'abus en est trop grand,
Et qui sait souffrir et se taire
S'éloigne de vous en pleurant. Quel que soit le mal qu'il endure,
Son triste rôle est le plus beau.
J'aime encore mieux notre torture
Que votre métier de bourreau.”
― Alfred de Musset

“L'humanité souleva sa robe et me montra, comme à un adepte digne d'elle, sa monstrueuse nudité.”
― Alfred de Musset, Lorenzaccio

“el beso es el contacto de dos epidermis y la fusion de dos fantasias...”
― Alfred De Musset, On ne badine pas avec l'amour

“Three elements entered into the life which offered itself to these
children: behind them a past forever destroyed, still quivering on its
ruins with all the fossils of centuries of absolutism; before them the
aurora of an immense horizon, the first gleams of the future; and between
these two worlds--like the ocean which separates the Old World from the
New--something vague and floating, a troubled sea filled with wreckage,
traversed from time to time by some distant sail or some ship trailing
thick clouds of smoke; the present, in a word, which separates the past
from the future, which is neither the one nor the other, which resembles
both, and where one can not know whether, at each step, one treads on
living matter or on dead refuse.”
― Alfred De Musset, The confession of a child of the century