Alphonse de Lamartine

Alphonse Marie Louise Prat de Lamartine (Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Prat de Lamartine) (October 21, 1790 - February 28, 1869) was a French writer, poet, and politician.

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• O time, arrest your flight! and you, propitious hours, arrest your course! Let us savor the fleeting delights of our most beautiful days!
  • The Lake, st. 6 (1820)

• I say to this night: "Pass more slowly"; and the dawn will come to dispel the night.
  • The Lake, st. 8 (1820)

• Let us love the passing hour, let us hurry up and enjoy our time.
  • The Lake, st. 9 (1820)

• Love alone was left, as a great image of a dream that was erased.
  • The Valley, st. 9 (1820)

• Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.
  • Méditations Poétiques, Sermon 2 (1820)

• What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?
  • Méditations Poétiques, Second series, Sermon 15 (1820)

• Experience is the only prophesy of wise men.
  • Speech at Mâcon (1847)

• To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.
  • Graziella, Pt. IV, ch. 5 (1849)

• The more I see of the representatives of the people, the more I admire my dogs.
  • From Count d'Orsay's Letter to John Forster (1850)

• Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.
  • "L'Isolement", Méditations Poétiques (1820)

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

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

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

• Private passions tire and exhaust themselves, public ones never.

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

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

• Our only truth is our sorrow.

• What crime have we commited in order to be born?

• God is nothing but a dream word, in order to explain the existence of the world.

• I am tired of museums - these cemeteries of art.