ALFRED DE MUSSET

There is no worse sorrow than remembering happiness in the day of sorrow.

Great artists have no country.

I cannot help it - in spite of myself, infinity torments me.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception.

One must not trifle with love.

The return makes one love the farewell.

The most despairing songs are the most beautiful, and I know some immortal ones that are pure tears.

With a kiss let us set out for an unknown world.

Things they don't understand always cause a sensation among the English.

Damned be the family and society. Cursed be the home.

Great artists have no fatherland.

Taxes are a universal burden in moral as well as in civil life. There is not a pleasure, social or otherwise, which is not assessed by fate at its full value!

Become corrupt, corrupt, and you will cease to suffer!" This has been the cry of all cities to man.

Nothing is a sin when you obey the orders of a priest

The life of a devotee is a crusade of which the heart is the Holy Land.

Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!

Few persons enjoy real liberty; we are all slaves to ideas or habits.

life is a deep sleep of which love is the dream

The apartments of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: a conglomeration of classical antiquity, gothic, renaissance; Louis XIII... Something from every century but our own, a predicament that has arisen in no other period... so that we seem to be subsisting on the ruins of the past, as if the end of the world were near.

A happy memory is perhaps on this earth truer than happiness itself.

Know that there is often hidden in us a dormant poet, always young and alive.

You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep

The heart that once has been your shrine for other loves is too divine

Look at the sun! It’s dry, it’s dead, it needs a drink, it wants blood! And I’ll give it blood!