Quotes by 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

Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives

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

Is is true that dictators never dream because they can change their smallest fantasies into realities if they want to?

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

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!

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

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

Look at the sun! It’s dry, it’s dead, it needs a drink, it wants blood! And I’ll give it blood!

Hast thou found out, Voltaire, that it is bliss to die, And does thy hideous smile over thy bleached bones fly?

Christianity ruined emperors but saved peoples.

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

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

One must not trifle with love.

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

“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 nest quun 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, cest lunion 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 : Jai souffert souvent, je me suis trompé quelquefois, mais jai aimé. Cest moi qui ai vécu, et non pas un être factice créé par mon orgueil et mon ennui.”