Alphonse de Lamartine Quotes
“Wonderful power of a book, that can work upon the feelings of an untutored child and an ignorant family with all the force of a reality, and the reading of which is an event in the life of the heart!”
“In these written tears alone have I expiated the hardness and ingratitude of my heart of eighteen years. I can never read over these verses without adoring that youthful image which the transparent and plaintive waves of the Gulf of Naples will ever bring to me,—nor without hating myself. But souls above forgive. Hers has forgiven me. Forgive me, too, reader, for I have wept.”
“For these people, music and poetry are only themes which they elaborate into their own feelings. They feed upon the same verses and the same airs for centuries and never tire of them. Nature itself—the sublimity of music and poetry—what has she but two or three words and two or three notes, always the same, with which she saddens or fascinates men from the very first sigh to the very last?”
“would seem as though language is the only predestination of man, and that he is created to bring it forth as his fruit. Man frets until he has given external expression to that which works within. Written language is like a mirror which it is necessary to have in order that man may know himself and be sure that he exists. So long as he does not see himself in his works he is not sure that he lives. The soul, like the body, has its ripe age.”
“Poetry has no echo so loud and long as in the heart of youth in which love is just springing into life. It is like the presentiment of all the passions. Later it is their souvenir and their dirge. It brings tears in both extremes of life: to the young, tears of hope; to the old, tears of regret.”
“Brutality to an animal is cruelty to mankind – it is only the difference in the victim.”
“God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world”
Time is a great ocean, which, like the other ocean, overflows with our remains. We can not weep over every thing. Every man has his own sorrows, every century its own pity, and this is enough.”
“The more I see of the representatives of the people, the more I admire my dogs.”
“There is a woman at the beginning of all great things.”
“To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.”
“Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.”
“Love is the enchanted dawn of every heart.”
“Grief and sadness knits two hearts in closer bonds that happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger than common joys.”
“Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated”
“Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images, the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire: that is MUHAMMAD. As regards all the standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask IS THERE ANY MAN GREATER THAN HE?”
“If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astonishing results are the three criteria of a human genius, who could dare compare any great man in history with Muhammad?”
“Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.”
“I surmised what it was to love, and I took this presentiment for love itself.”
“It is a trade that makes the heart contented and the soul confident in the protection of the saints. The fisherman is under the immediate charge of heaven.”
“I don’t believe it is good to constantly deify war as if peace, which is the happiness and glory of the world, could be the shame of nations.”
“was in this way that the people of antiquity, when they had raised a temple on the site of one which had been torn down, always took care to introduce into the new building some of the materials, or at least a column, of the old one, in order to preserve something of the old and sacred in the modern, and in order that the souvenir, crude and worn, should have its worship and its influence over the heart, even among the master-pieces of the new sanctuary.”
“Silence—the applause of real and durable impressions—was broken by no one; each respected in the other the thoughts he felt to be the same as his own.”
“All was as confused in my grief as in my feelings. I was like a man senseless from some sudden blow, who knows not whence comes his suffering, but knows only that he suffers.”
“If the grandeur of the aim, the smallness of the means, the immensity of the result are the three measures of a man’s genius, who would dare humanly compare a great man of modern history with Muhammad?”
