Alexandre Dumas Quotes

My dear fellow Said Albert, turning to Franz here is an admirable adventure; we will fill our carriage with pistols, blunderbusses, and double-barreled shotguns. Luigi Vampa comes to take us, and we take him - we bring him back to Rome , and present him to him holiness the Pope, who asks how he can repay so great a service; Then we merely ask for a cariage and a pair of horses, and we will see the Carnival in the carriage , and doubtless the Roman people will crown us at the capitol , and proclaim us, like Curtius and the veiled Horatius, the preservers of there country. Whilst Albert proposed this scheme, signor Pastrini's face assumed an expression impossible to describe.

~ Alexandre Dumas

The truth is that you are afraid.''Afraid? I do not know all the words in the Parisian jargon, and I know not what you mean.

~ Alexandre Dumas

There is no friendship that cares about an overheard secret.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Friendship throws out deep roots in honest hearts, D'Artagnan. Believe me, it is only the evil-minded who deny friendship; they cannot understand it.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Joyful friends, mostly loyal, they hadn't abandoned their protector before the gathering storm; and despite the threatening sky, despite the shuddering earth, they remained, smiling, considerate, and as devoted to misfortune as they had been to prosperity.

~ Alexandre Dumas

The King! I thought him enough of a philosopher to realize that there is no such thing as murder in politics. You know as well as I do, my dear boy, that in politics there are no people, only ideas; no feelings, only interests. In politics, you don't kill a man, you remove an obstacle, that's all.

~ Alexandre Dumas

The king! I thought he was philosopher enough to allow that there was no murder in politics. In politics, my dear fellow, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but ideas - no feelings, but interests; in politics we do not kill a man, we only remove an obstacle, that is all.

~ Alexandre Dumas

In politics, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but ideas - no feelings, but interests.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Women are never so strong as after their defeat.

~ Alexandre Dumas

we said we would be to each other as two voices, who shadows.

~ Alexandre Dumas

D'Artagnan had time to reflect that women - those gentle doves - treat one another more cruelly than bears and tigers.

~ Alexandre Dumas

You are perfectly right in objecting to them [modern art], for this one great fault - that they have not yet had time to become old.

~ Alexandre Dumas

It is quite rare for God to provide a great man at the necessary moment to carry out some great deep, which is why when this unusual combination of circumstance does occur, history at once records the name of the chosen one and recommends him to the admiration of posterity.

~ Alexandre Dumas

We are entitled to violate history, provided that it results in handsome offspring.

~ Alexandre Dumas

As it was a time of war between the Catholics and the Huguenots, and as he saw the Catholics exterminate the Huguenots and the Huguenots exterminate the Catholics--all in the name of religion--he adopted a mixed belief which permitted him to be sometimes Catholic, sometimes a Huguenot. Now, he was accustomed to walk with his fowling piece on his shoulder, behind the hedges which border the roads, and when he saw a Catholic coming alone, the Protestant religion immediately prevailed in his mind. He lowered his gun in the direction of the traveler; then, when he was within ten paces of him, he commenced a conversation which almost always ended by the traveler's abandoning his purse to save his life. It goes without saying that when he saw a Huguenot coming, he felt himself filled with such ardent Catholic zeal that he could not understand how, a quarter of an hour before, he had been able to have any doubts upon the superiority of our holy religion.

~ Alexandre Dumas

To save a man and thereby to spare a father's agony and a mother's feelings is not to do a noble deed, it is but an act of humanity.

~ Alexandre Dumas

But these first needs of the heart are so imperious, these outpourings of amorous melancholy in young people are at once so sweet and so bitter, that they have often all the real marks of the passion.

~ Alexandre Dumas

The kingdoms of kings are confined, either by mountains or rivers, or by a change in customs or by a difference of language; but my kingdom is as great as the world, because I am neither Italian, nor French, nor Hindu, nor American, nor a Spaniard; I am a cosmopolitan. No country can claim to be my birthplace, God alone knows in which region I shall die. I adopt every custom, I speak every tongue [... ] In this way, you see, being of no country, asking for the protection of no goverment and acknowledging no man as my brother, I am not restrained or hampered by a single one of the scruples that tie the hands of the powerful or the obstacles that block the path of the weak.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Besides we are men, and after all it is our business to risk our lives.

~ Alexandre Dumas

We must never expect discretion in first love: it is accompanied by such excessive joy that unless the joy is allowed to overflow, it will choke you.

~ Alexandre Dumas

I was delighted to see you again, and forgot for the moment that all happiness is fleeting.

~ Alexandre Dumas

The truth is,’ replied Dantes, ‘that I am too happy for noisy mirth; ...joy takes a strange effect at times, it seems to oppress us almost the same as sorrow.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Let me struggle like a woman- my strength lies in my weakness. - Milady

~ Alexandre Dumas

My friend, let us enjoy the present and give no thought to the evils of the future.

~ Alexandre Dumas

He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, - ‘Wait and hope.’ – Your friend, Edmond Dantes, Count of Monte Cristo. The eyes of both were fixed on the spot indicated by the sailor, and on the blue-line separating the sky from the Mediterranean Sea, they perceived a large white sail.

~ Alexandre Dumas

There are words which close a conversation as with an iron door.

~ Alexandre Dumas

There are some situations which men understand by instinct, by which reason is powerless to explain; in such cases the greatest poet is he who gives utterance to the most natural and vehement outburst of sorrow. Those who hear the bitter cry are as much impressed as if they listened to an entire poem, and when th sufferer is sincere they are right in regarding his outburst as sublime.

~ Alexandre Dumas

There are cancers so insidious in their nature that their very pulsation is invisible. Such cancers leave the ivory whiteness of the skin untouched, and marble not the firm, fair flesh, with their blue tints; the physician who bends over the patient's chest hears not, through he listens, the insatiable teeth of the disease grinding its onward progress through the muscles, as the blood flows freely on; the knife has never been able to destroy, and rarely even, temporarily, to discern the rage of these mortal scourges; their home is in the mind, which they corrupt; they fill the whole heart until it breaks. Such, madame, are the cancers, fatal to queens; are you, too, free from their scourge?

~ Alexandre Dumas

Can we account for instinct?' said Monte Cristo. 'Are there not some places where we seem to breathe sadness? — why, we cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections — an idea which carries you back to other times, to other places — which, very likely, have no connection with the present time and place.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Oh, Mercédès, I have spoken your name with sighs of melancholy, with groans of pain and with the croak of despair. I have spoken it frozen with cold, huddled on the straw of my dungeon. I have spoken it raging with heat and rolling around on the stone floor of my prison. Mercédès, I must have my revenge, because for fourteen years I suffered, fourteen years I wept and cursed. Now, I say to you, Mercédès, I must have my revenge!

~ Alexandre Dumas

There are some catastrophes that a poor writer's pen cannot describe and which he is obliged to leave to the imagination of his readers with a bald statement of the facts.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Athos was delighted to find he was going to fight an Englishman. We might say that was his dream.

~ Alexandre Dumas

MY GOD!' read Monte Cristo, 'LET ME KEEP MY MEMORY!

~ Alexandre Dumas

There is something so awe-inspiring in great afflictions that even in the worst times the first emotion of a crowd has generally been to sympathise with the sufferer in a great catastrophe.

~ Alexandre Dumas

To wait at Monte Cristo for the purpose of watching like a dragon over the almost incalculable richs that had thus fallen into his possession satisfied not the cravings of his heart, which yearned to return to dwell among mankind, and to assume the rank, power, and influence which are always accorded to wealth — that first and greatest of all the forces within the grasp of man.

~ Alexandre Dumas

This sometimes happened: from time to time, Dantès, driven out of solitude into the world, felt an imperative need for solitude. And what solitude is more vast and more poetic than that of a ship sailing alone on the sea, in the darkness of night and the silence of infinity, under the eye of the Lord?

~ Alexandre Dumas

Sometimes one has suffered enough to have the right to never say: I am too happy.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Sometimes salvation is found in agony.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Life is no more than the repeated fulfilling of a permanent desire.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures.

~ Alexandre Dumas