Alfred De Musset Quotes

Any cigar smoker is a friend, because I know how he feels.

Life is a sleep, love is a dream; and you have lived if you have loved.

Perfection does not exist; to understand it is the triumph of human intelligence; to expect to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness.

The only true language in the world is a kiss.

Take time as it comes, the wind as it blows, woman as she is.

life is a deep sleep of which love is the dream

How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception.

The glass I drink from is not large, but at least it is my own.

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

Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives

There is no worse sorrow than remembering happiness in the day of sorrow.

If you are weak, dependent upon others, inclined to allow yourself to be dominated by opinion, to take root wherever you see a little soil, make for yourself a shield that will resist everything, for if you yield to your weaker nature you will not grow, you will dry up like a dead plant, and you will bear neither fruit nor flowers.

The heart that once has been your shrine for other loves is too divine

I could not clearly distinguish what was passing in my head;

it seemed to me that I was under the influence of a horrible dream and that I had but to awake to find myself cured; at times it seemed that my entire life had been a dream, ridiculous and childish, the falseness of which had just been disclosed.

Great artists have no country.

How glorious it is -- and also how painful -- to be an exception.

As all the perfumes of the vanished dayRise from the earth still moistened with the dewSo from my chastened soul beneath thy rayOld love is born anew.

I cannot help it - in spite of myself, infinity torments me.

The return makes one love the farewell.

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.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

The fumes of wine fermented in my head;

it was one of those moments of intoxication when all that ones sees and hears, speaks to one of the adored.... One would willingly embrace all who smile, and one feels that he is brother of all who live.

The most disagreeable thing that your worst enemy says to your face does not approach what your best friends say behind your back.

[I]f you are truly a man, sure of yourself and confident of your strength, you may taste of life without fear and without reserve; you may be sad or joyous, deceived or respected; but be sure you are loved, for what matters the rest?

Repartee is altogether a natural endowment, and is the lightning of the mind.

Christianity ruined emperors, but saved peoples.

It is easy to promise, and alas! How easy to forget!

Know that there is often hidden in us a dormant poet, always young and alive.

Vanity and dignity are incompatible with each other; vain women are almost sure to be vulnerable.

Oh! my friend, when you feel bursting on your lips the vow of eternal love, do not be afraid to yield, but do not confound wine with intoxication; do not think the cup divine because the draft is of celestial flavor; do not be astonished to find it broken and empty in the evening.

A happy memory is perhaps on this earth truer than happiness itself.

It was one of those somber evenings when the sighing of the wind resembles the moans of a dying man; a storm was brewing, and between the splashes of rain on the windows there was the silence of death. All nature suffers in such moments; the trees writhe in pain and twist their heads; the birds of the fields cower under the bushes; the streets of cities are deserted.

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!

I can't help it, the idea of the infinite torments me.

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

Experience is the name men give to their follies or their sorrows.

Few persons enjoy real liberty; we are all slaves to ideas or habits.

Memory is what makes us young or old.

I deeply wished I could make the stars all come down and breathe them; disappear in them

The most despairing songs are the most beautiful, and I know some immortal ones that are pure tears.

The apartments of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: a conglomeration of classical antiquity, gothic, renaissance; Louis XIII... Something from every century but our own, a predicament that has arisen in no other period... so that we seem to be subsisting on the ruins of the past, as if the end of the world were near.

One must not trifle with love.

Man is a pupil, pain is his teacher.

The mouth keeps silent to hear the heart speak.

Nothing is a sin when you obey the orders of a priest

Happiness may have but one night, as glory but one day.

Take love as a sober man takes wine; do not become a drunkard. If your mistress is sincere and faithful, love her for that; but if she is not, if she is merely young and beautiful, love her for that; if she is agreeable and spirituelle, love her for that; if she is none of these things but merely loves you, love her for that. Love does not come to us every day.

In love matters; keep your pen from paper.

... but one loves, and when one is on the brink of death, one turns around to look backward, and one says to oneself: "I have often suffered, I have sometimes been wrong, but I have loved.