Alfred de Vigny
Alfred de Vigny
Alfred Victor, Comte de Vignywas a French poet and early leader of French Romanticism. He also produced novels, plays, and translations of Shakespeare. Unlike many of the French Romantics, Vigny was an army officer with conservative and consistently royalist views...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth27 March 1797
CountryFrance
eye men race
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.
hands two public-opinion
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.
philosophy religion eternity
But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
nature men doubt
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.
people novel
History is a novel for which the people is the author.
dream greatness age
Greatness is the dream of youth realized in old age.
funny sarcastic ideas
The true God, the mighty God, is the God of ideas.
fate long tasks
Perform your long and heavy task with energy, treading the path to which Fate has been pleased to call you.
events needed
The events I sought were never as great as I needed them to be.
art wall philosophy
Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.
moving animal desert
Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.
heart long silence
Silence alone is great; all else is feebleness . . . Perform with all your heart your long and heavy task. . . . Then as do I, say naught, but suffer and die.
army vices nations
An army is a nation within a nation, it is one of the vices of courage.
truth honesty doubt
Doubt is the freedom of thought. Any claim to truth can be doubted.