Alfred de Musset Art Quotations

The life of a devotee is a crusade of which the heart is the Holy Land.

Great artists have no country.

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

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 sap of your life will dissipate into the formation of a useless bark; all your actions will be as colorless as the leaves of the willow; you will have no tears to water you, but those from your own eyes, to nourish you, no heart but your own.

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

The soft contralto notes of a woman's voice are born in the immediate region of the heart.

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.

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

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

The mouth keeps silent to hear the heart speak.