Quotes from Alphonse de Lamartine

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. I am the fellow citizen of every being that thinks; my country is Truth.

God has placed the genius of women in their hearts, because the works of this genius are always works of love.

Hence life, as through a cloud, for me I see Vanish, and to the past's dark shade 'tis chas'd; As a grand image love remains to me-- Sole remnant of a dream, by morn effac'd.

Habit with it's iron sinews, clasps us and leads us day by day.

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

Let us savour the swift delights of the most beautiful of our days!

True greatness is sovereign wisdom. We are never deceived by our virtues.

We cannot have two hearts, one for the animals and one for men. In cruelty towards the former and cruelty to the latter there is no difference but in the victim.

Man is born barbarous--he is ransomed from the condition of beasts only by being cultivated.

After his blood, that which a man can next give out of himself is a tear.

The attractiveness that exists to man in the very helplessness of woman is scarcely realized.

The photographer will never replace the painter; one is a man, the other a machine. Let us compare them no longer. (1848)

Thou makest the man, O Sorrow!--yes, the whole man,--as the crucible gold.

Man, man, is thy brother, and thy father is God.

Men are misers, and women prodigal, in affection.

The reason that women are so much more sociable than men is because they act more from the heart than the intellect.

The people only understand what they can feel; the only orators that can affect them are those who move them.

Argument should be polite as well as logical.

An artist should have more than two eyes.

Photography is better than art. It is a solar phenomenon in which the artist collaborates with the sun.

Exquisite beauty resides rather in the female form than face, where it is also more lasting.

If they say "you have your last chance to look at the world", I wish that look would from Çaml?ca of Istanbul.

Brutality to an animal is cruelty to mankind - it is only the difference in the victim.

Chance often gives us that which we should not have presumed to ask.