Alfred de Vigny Quotations

Invisible is real. Souls have their own world.

What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?

The acts of the human race on the world's stage have doubtless a coherent unity, but the meaning of the vast tragedy enacted will be visible only to the eye of God, until the end, which will reveal it perhaps to the last man.

One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.

Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

From this, without doubt, sprang the fable. Man created it thus, because it was not given him to see more than himself and nature, which surrounds him; but he created it true with a truth all its own.

I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.

The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.

History is a novel for which the people is the author.