Alfred de Musset Quotations

With a kiss let us set out for an unknown world.

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

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

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

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

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

Things they don't understand always cause a sensation among the English.

The costliest women are the ones who cost nothing.

Disgrace is the synonym of discovery.

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

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

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

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.

Christianity ruined emperors, but saved peoples.

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.

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

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

A lively retrospect summons back to us once more our youth, with vivid reflex of its early joys and unstained pleasures.

Partake of love as a temperate man partakes of wine; do not become intoxicated.

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

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

Great artists have no country.

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

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

Taxes are a universal burden in moral as well as in civil life. There is not a pleasure, social or otherwise, which is not assessed by fate at its full value!

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

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

[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?

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.

Become corrupt, corrupt, and you will cease to suffer!" This has been the cry of all cities to man...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

In love matters; keep your pen from paper.

One must not trifle with love

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

I have come too late into a world too old.

Man is a pupil, pain is his teacher.

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.

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

The return makes one love the farewell.

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

Reason may cure illusions, but not suffering.

I see that you believe in love such as the poets and romancers have represented... The poets represent love as the sculptors design beauty, as the 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.... To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is the same thing as to seek on the public squares such a woman as Venus or to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.

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

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

Memory is what makes us young or old.

The only truth is love beyond reason.

Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives

life is a deep sleep of which love is the dream

Doubt, if you will, the being who loves you, Woman or dog, but never doubt love itself.

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

The mouth keeps silent to hear the heart speak.

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 don't know where my road is going, but I know that I walk better when I hold your hand.

In my flowery dreams there's always you. I do not regret it one bit.

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.

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

The only true language in the world is a kiss.

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

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

... 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.