Alfred de Musset Quotes

Hell is indefinite.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

Photography acts as a teaser, suggesting we can know something that we can never know. And the more we can't obtain it, the more we want it.

It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity.

I do suspect that this world is hell.

There is only one thing I want. I would like to be seriously ill, and to hear nothing more about him for at least a week. Why doesn't something happen to me? Why do I have to go through all this? If only I had never set eyes on him!

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Endless torments dwell about thee: Yet who would live, and live without thee!

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

… cast into a burning hell

It is silliness to live when to live is torment.

Endless moons, an opaque universe, thunder, tornadoes, the quaking earth. Rare moments of peace; forehead up against my knees, arms around my head, I though, I listened, I longed not to exist. but life was there, a transparent pearl, a star revolving slowly on its own axis.

A charm invests a face Imperfectly beheld,— The lady dare not lift her veil For fear it be dispelled. But peers beyond her mesh, And wishes, and denies,— Lest interview annul a want That image satisfies.

I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate.

We have no hope and yet we live in longing.

Hell is life drying up.

Nothing remains but to hope the end will come to extinguish the unrelenting pain of waiting for it.

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

What is hell?...The suffering that comes from the consciousness that one is no longer able to love.

There is no Mystery so great as Misery.

She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.

Ah, me, if this is love, then how it torments.

Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.

When you stare into an abyss for a long time, the abyss also stares into you.