Alphonse De Lamartine Quotes

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

If they say "you have your last chance to look at the world", I wish that look would from Çamlıca of Istanbul.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

Love is the enchanted dawn of every heart.

Kindness is virtue itself.

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.

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

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

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

Inspiration is solitary, never consecutive.

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

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

Modesty and dew love the shade.

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

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

An artist should have more than two eyes.

Man is born barbarous--he is ransomed from the condition of beasts only by being cultivated.

Void of freedom, what would virtue be?

Radicalism is but the desperation of logic.

Men are misers, and women prodigal, in affection.

If God is thy father, human beings are thy brothers and sisters.

Mystery hovers over all things here below.

Republicanism and ignorance are in bitter antagonism.

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

Eloquence dwells quite as much in the hearts of the hearers as on the lips of the orator.

After his blood, that which a man can next give out of himself is a tear.

Treason, which begins by being cautious, ends by betraying itself.

All nature is the temple; earth the altar.

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

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

The most effective coquetry is innocence.

Utopias are often just premature truths.

Good manners require space and time.

The attractiveness that exists to man in the very helplessness of woman is scarcely realized.

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

Ink is the transcript of thought.

Silence,--the applause of real and durable impressions.

Argument should be polite as well as logical.

Every time that a people which has long crouched in slavery and ignorance is moved to its lowest depths there appear monsters and heroes, prodigies of crime and prodigies of virtue.

Barbarism recommences by the excess of civilization.

The photographer will never replace the painter; one is a man, the other a machine. Let us compare them no longer. (1848)

Chance often gives us that which we should not have presumed to ask.

It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)

At twenty every one is republican.