Alphonse de Lamartine

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

— Alphonse de Lamartine

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

— Alphonse de Lamartine

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

— Alphonse de Lamartine

O time, arrest your flight! and you, propitious hours, arrest your course! Let us savor the fleeting delights of our most beautiful days!

— Alphonse de Lamartine

I say to this night: "Pass more slowly"; and the dawn will come to dispel the night.

— Alphonse de Lamartine

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

— Alphonse de Lamartine

Love alone was left, as a great image of a dream that was erased.

— Alphonse de Lamartine

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

— Alphonse de Lamartine

What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?

— Alphonse de Lamartine

Experience is the only prophecy of wise men.

— Alphonse de Lamartine

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

— Alphonse de Lamartine

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

— Alphonse de Lamartine

Silence is the winding-sheet of the past: it is sometimes impious, often dangerous to raise it. But even when it is raised piously and lovingly, the first moment is a cruel one.

— Alphonse de Lamartine

The very eagle, destined to soar so high and to see so far, begins his life in the fissures of the rocks, and in his early days only sees the arid and sometimes fetid borders of his eyry.

— Alphonse de Lamartine

Until the age of twelve, then, I only lived on bread, milk-food, vegetables, and fruit. My health was not less robust on this account, nor my growth less rapid, and it was to this diet, perhaps, that I was indebted for that purity of feature, that exquisite sensibility of feeling, and that serene gentleness of humor and character which I had preserved up to that period.

— Alphonse de Lamartine

The doctrine of the cynics is the Ideal reversed, the parody of physical and moral beauty, the crime of mind, the degradation of imagination. I could not take pleasure in it. There was too much enthusiasm within me to permit me to crawl through those sinks of the brain. My nature had wings. The dangers to which I was exposed were above, not below.

— Alphonse de Lamartine

Experience is the only prophecy of wise men.

— Alphonse de Lamartine

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

— Alphonse de Lamartine

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

— Alphonse de Lamartine

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

— Alphonse de Lamartine

Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images, the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire: that is MUHAMMAD. As regards all the standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask IS THERE ANY MAN GREATER THAN HE?

— Alphonse de Lamartine