Alexandre Dumas Quotes

However anxious one is to reach one’s goal, one can excuse delays on the route when these are caused by ovations.
Alexandre Dumas
At Rome thing can or cannot be done when you are told anything cannot be done, there is an end of it.""It is much more convenient at Paris; when anything cannot be done you pay double and it is done directly
Alexandre Dumas
All human wisdom is summed up in two words - wait and hope.
Alexandre Dumas
A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
Alexandre Dumas
A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
Alexandre Dumas
All human wisdom is summed up in two words-wait and hope.
Alexandre Dumas
A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself.
Alexandre Dumas
All human wisdom is summed up in two words: wait and hope.
Alexandre Dumas
So heavy is the chain of wedlock that it needs two to carry it and sometimes three.
Alexandre Dumas
Business? It's quite simple. It's other people's money.
Alexandre Dumas
How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure.
Alexandre Dumas
Death is the only serious preoccupation in life.
Alexandre Dumas
Yet man will never be perfect until he learns to create and destroy; he does know how to destroy, and that is half the battle.
Alexandre Dumas
So much the worse for those who fear wine, for it is because they have some bad thoughts which they are afraid the liquor will extract from their hearts.
Alexandre Dumas
Oh, mankind, race of crocodiles! How well I recognize you down there, and how worthy you are of yourselves!
Alexandre Dumas
All human wisdom is contained in these two words: 'wait' and 'hope'".
Alexandre Dumas
I do as I please, Monsieur Beauchamp, and believe me, what I do is always well done.
Alexandre Dumas
I do what I please, M. Beauchamp, and it is always well done.
Alexandre Dumas
Why does a steward steal? He steals because he's not sure he'll always remain with his master and wants to make his future secure.
Alexandre Dumas
Melancholy in a capitalist, like the appearance of a comet, presages some misfortune to the world.
Alexandre Dumas
Through the ingenuousness of her age beamed an ardent mind, a mind not of the women but of the poet; she did not please, she intoxicated.
Alexandre Dumas
You instinctively display the greatest virtue, or rather the chief defect, of us eccentric Parisians- that is, you assume the vices you have not, and conceal the virtues you possess.
Alexandre Dumas
Indeed, four men like them, four men devoted to each other from their money to their lives, four men always supporting each other, never retreating, performing singly or together the resolutions they had made in common; four arms threatening the four points of the compass or all turning to a single point, must inevitably, be it surreptitiously, be it openly, be it by mines, by entrenchments, by guile, or by force, open a way to the end they wanted to reach, however well defended or far off it might be.
Alexandre Dumas
You see that God deems it right to take from me any claim to merit for what you call my devotion to you. I have promised to remain forever with you, and now I could not break my promise if I would. The treasure will be no more mine than yours, and neither of us will quit this prison. But my real treasure is not that, my dear friend, which awaits me beneath the somber rocks of Monte Cristo, it is your presence, our living together five or six hours a day, in spite of our jailers; it is the rays of intelligence you have elicited from my brain, the languages you have implanted in my memory, and which have taken root there with all of their philological ramifications. These different sciences that you have made so easy to me by the depth of the knowledge you possess of them, and the clearness of the principles to which you have reduced them – this is my treasure, my beloved friend, and with this you have made me rich and happy. Believe me, and take comfort, this is better for me than tons of gold and cases of diamonds, even were they not as problematical as the clouds we see in the morning floating over the sea, which we take for terra firma, and which evaporate and vanish as we draw near to them. To have you as long as possible near me, to hear your eloquent speech, -- which embellishes my mind, strengthens my soul, and makes my whole frame capable of great and terrible things, if I should ever be free, -- so fills my whole existence, that the despair to which I was just on the point of yielding when I knew you, has no longer any hold over me; this – this is my fortune – not chimerical, but actual. I owe you my real good, my present happiness; and all the sovereigns of the earth, even Caesar Borgia himself, could not deprive me of this.
Alexandre Dumas
Ah, Caderousse,' said Andrea, 'how covetous you are! Two months ago you were dying with hunger.''The appetite grows by what it feeds on,' said Caderousse.
Alexandre Dumas
If it is ones lot to be cast among fools, one must learn foolishness.
Alexandre Dumas
She is not my mistress,' replied the young sailor gravely, ‘she is my betrothed.’'Sometimes one and the same thing,' said Morrel, with a smile.'Not with us, sir,' replied Dantes.
Alexandre Dumas
Enough,' said Mercedes, 'enough Edmond! Believe me that she who alone recognized you has been the only one to comprehend you. And had she crossed your path, and you had crushed her like a frail glass, still, Edmond, still she must have admired you! Like the gulf between me and the past, there is an abyss between you, Edmond, and the rest of mankind; and I tell you freely, that the comparison I drew between you and other men will be one of my greatest tortures. No! there is nothing in the world to resemble you in worth and goodness!
Alexandre Dumas
True, I have raped history, but it has produced some beautiful offspring.
Alexandre Dumas
Besides the pleasure, there is always remorse, from the indulgence of our passions; and, after all, what have you men to fear from all this; the world excuses, and notoriety ennobles you?
Alexandre Dumas
All for one and one for all.
Alexandre Dumas
All for one and one for all, united we stand divided we fall.
Alexandre Dumas
Human inventions march from thecomplex to the simple, and simplicity is always perfection.
Alexandre Dumas
these groups followed some solitary passer-by, hurrying his steps; one after another the doors were closed, one after
Alexandre Dumas
How well I know you by your deeds and how invariably you succeed in living down to what one expects of you!
Alexandre Dumas
Fool that I am," said he,"that I did not tear out my heart the day I resolved to revenge myself".
Alexandre Dumas
I have no fear of ghosts, and I have never heard it said that so much harm had been done by the dead during 6,000 years as it brought by the living in a single day.
Alexandre Dumas
Is not a day divided into twenty-four hours, each hour into sixty minutes, and every minute sub-divided into sixty seconds? Now in 86,400 seconds many things can be done.
Alexandre Dumas
In all well-organised brains, the predominating idea—and there always is one—is sure to be the last thought before sleeping, and the first upon waking in the morning. Andrea had scarcely opened his eyes when his predominating idea presented itself, and whispered in his ear that he had slept too long.
Alexandre Dumas
I cannot think that man is meant to find happiness so easily! Happiness is like one of those palaces on an enchanted island, its gates guarded by dragons. One must fight to gain it; and, in truth, I do not know what I have done to deserve the good fortune of becoming Mercédès, husband.
Alexandre Dumas
The dream of poor Bazin had always been to serve a man of the cloth.
Alexandre Dumas
Very well, young man, very well," Treville went on, "I know those airs. I came to Paris with four ecus in my pocket, and I'd have fought with anybody who told me I was in no condition to buy the Louvre.
Alexandre Dumas
...remember that what has once been done may be done again.
Alexandre Dumas
How strange," continued the king, with some asperity; "the police think that they have disposed of the whole matter when they say, 'A murder has been committed,' and especially so when they can add, 'And we are on the track of the guilty persons.
Alexandre Dumas
Dantes,rejected by all the world,frequently experienced a desire for solitude, and what solitude is at the same time more complete,more poetical , than that of a bark floating isolated on the sea during the obscurity of the night, in the silence of immensity and under the eye of Heaven? Now this solitude was peopled with this thoughts, the night lighted by his illusions, and the silence animated by his anticipations.
Alexandre Dumas
Happy! who can answer for that? Happiness or unhappiness is the secret known but to oneself…
Alexandre Dumas
the greater number of a man's errors come before him disguised under the specious form of necessity; then, after error has been committed in a moment of excitement, of delirium, or of fear, we see that we might have avoided and escaped it.
Alexandre Dumas
Unfortunately in this world of ours, each person views things through a certain medium, which prevents his seeing them in the same light as others…
Alexandre Dumas
Dantes had entered the Chateau d’If with the round, open, smiling face of a young and happy man, with whom the earlypaths of life have been smooth. and who anticipates a future corresponding with his past. This was now all changed. The oval face was lengthened, his smiling mouth had assumed the firm and markedlines which betoken resolution; his eyebrows were arched beneath a brow furrowed with thought; his eyes were full of melancholy, and from their depths occasionally sparkled gloomy fires of misanthropy and hatred; his complexion, so long kept from the sun, had now that pale color which produces, when the features are encircled with black hair, the aristocratic beauty of the man of the north; the profound learning he had acquired had besides diffused over his features a refined intellectual expression; and he had also acquired, being naturally of a goodly stature, that vigor which a frame possesses which has so long concentrated all its force within itself.
Alexandre Dumas
Be happy, noble heart, be blessed for all the good thou hast done and wilt do hereafter, and let my gratitude remain in obscurity like your good deeds.
Alexandre Dumas
And now,' said the unknown, 'farewell kindness, humanity, and gratitude! Farewell to all the feelings that expand the heart! I have been heaven's substitute to recompense the good - now the god of vengeance yields to me his power to punish the wicked!
Alexandre Dumas
God may seem sometimes to forget for a while, whilst his justice reposes, but there always comes a moment when he remembers.
Alexandre Dumas
God is merciful to all, as he has been to you; he is first a father, then a judge.
Alexandre Dumas
The voice of human nature is nothing but one prolonged cry.
Alexandre Dumas
Besides, we feel always a sort of mental superiority over those whose lives we know better than they suppose.
Alexandre Dumas
As a general rule...people ask for advice only in order not to follow it; or if they do follow it, in order to have someone to blame for giving it.
Alexandre Dumas
Danglars was one of those men born with a pen behind the ear, and an inkstand in place of a heart. Everything with him was multiplication or subtraction. The life of a man was to him of far less value than a numeral, especially when, by taking it away, he could increase the sum total of his own desires. He went to bed at his usual hour, and slept in peace.
Alexandre Dumas
What would you not have accomplished if you had been free?""Possibly nothing at all; the overflow of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds electricity is produced — from electricity, lightning, from lightning, illumination.
Alexandre Dumas
You are young," replied Athos, "and your bitter memories have time to change into sweet ones.
Alexandre Dumas
...M. Danglars, who had listened to all this preamble with imperturbable coolness, but without understanding a word, engaged as he was, like every man burdened with thoughts of the past, in seeking the thread of his own ideas in those of the speaker.
Alexandre Dumas