Top 132 Quotes & Sayings by Alphonse de Lamartine

The people only understand what they can feel; the only orators that can affect them are those who move them.

The more I see of the representatives of the people, the more I admire my dogs.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.

Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.

Habit with it's iron sinews, clasps us and leads us day by day.

Limited in his nature, infinite in his desire, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven.

Brutality to an animal is cruelty to mankind - it is only the difference in the victim.

A conscience without God is like a court without a judge.

Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

Experience is the only prophecy of wise men.

Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.

Private passions tire and exhaust themselves, public ones never.

Poetry has been the guardian angel of humanity in all ages.

God has placed the genius of women in their hearts, because the works of this genius are always works of love.

We don't have two hearts, one for animals and one for humans ; we have one heart or we don't have any.

Inspiration is solitary, never consecutive.

Life is too short to spare an hour of it in the indulgence of this evil passion.

Let us love the passing hour, let us hurry up and enjoy our time.

Mystery hovers over all things here below.

All our tastes are but reminiscences.

Assassination makes only martyrs, not converts.

Philosophy is the rational expression of genius.

A woman's strength is most potent when robed in gentleness.

The reason that women are so much more sociable than men is because they act more from the heart than the intellect.

Newspapers will ultimately engross all literature.

Exquisite beauty resides rather in the female form than face, where it is also more lasting.

Modesty and dew love the shade.

It is for truth that God created genius.

Let us savour the swift delights of the most beautiful of our days!

Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.

Friendship, sweet-resting place of the soul, the gloaming wherein our hearts find peace.

Let us enjoy the fugitive hour. Man has no harbor, time has no shore; it rushes on, and carries us with it.

Argument should be polite as well as logical.

The most effective coquetry is innocence.

History teaches everything, even the future.

Void of freedom, what would virtue be?

Kindness is virtue itself.

There is a woman at the begining of all great things.

True love is the ripe fruit of a lifetime.

There is a name hidden in the shadow of my soul, where I read it night and day and no other eye sees it.

Yet, in these autumn days when Nature expires, Here, in these veiled scenes, I find more attractions; It is a friend's sad goodbye; it is the last smile From lips that death is going to close forever!

Silence and simplicity obtrude on no one, but are yet two unequaled attractions in woman.

True greatness is sovereign wisdom. We are never deceived by our virtues.

Good manners require space and time.

Religions are not proved, are not demonstrated, are not established, are not overthrown by logic! They are of all the mysteries of nature and the human mind, the most mysterious and most inexplicable; they are of instinct and not of reason.

We are earth's children, and life is the same in sap as in blood; all that the earth, our mother, feels and expresses to the eye by her form and aspect, in melancholy or in splendor, finds an echo within us.

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.

We cannot have two hearts, one for the animals and one for men. In cruelty towards the former and cruelty to the latter there is no difference but in the victim.

Love is the enchanted dawn of every heart.

Radicalism is but the desperation of logic.

Civil wars leave nothing but tombs.

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?

Utopias are often just premature truths.

Time is a great ocean which, like the other ocean, overflows with our remains.

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? The most famous men created arms, laws, and empires only. They founded, if anything at all, no more than material powers which often crumbled away before their eyes. This man moved not only armies, legislations, empires, peoples, dynasties, but millions of men in one-third of the then inhabited world; and more than that, he moved the altars, the gods, the religions, the ideas, the beliefs and the souls.

There is no man more complete than the one who travelled a lot, who changed the shape of his thoughts and his life twenty times.

It is the qualities of the heart, not those of the face, that should attract us in women, because the former are durable, the latter transitory. So lovable women, like roses, retain their sweetness long after they have lost their beauty.

Joy is a flame which association alone can keep alive, and which goes out unless communicated.