Poets represent love as sculptors design beauty, as musicians create melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization, they gat… - Alfred de Musset
" "Poets represent love as sculptors design beauty, as musicians create melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization, they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life, the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature. There lived, it is said, at Athens a great number of beautiful girls; Praxiteles drew them all one after another; then from these diverse types of beauty, each one of which had its defects, he formed a single faultless beauty and created Venus. The man who first created a musical instrument, and who gave to harmony its rules and its laws, had for a long time listened to the murmuring of reeds and the singing of birds. Thus the poets, who understand life, after knowing much of love, more or less transitory, after feeling that sublime exaltation which real passion can for the moment inspire, eliminating from human nature all that degrades it, created the mysterious names which through the ages fly from lip to lip: Daphnis and Chloe, Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe.
To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is but to seek on public squares a woman such as Venus, or to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.
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About Alfred de Musset
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay (11 December 1810 – 2 May 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist. Along with his poetry, he is known for writing the autobiographical novel La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century).
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Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay
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Alfred De Musset
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Louis Charles Alfred Musset
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Alfred de Musset-Pathay
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Alfred Louis Charles de Musset
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Additional quotes by Alfred de Musset
Se voir le plus possible et s'aimer seulement,
Sans ruse et sans détours, sans honte ni mensonge,
Sans qu'un désir nous trompe, ou qu'un remords nous ronge,
Vivre à deux et donner son cœur à tout moment;
Respecter sa pensée aussi loin qu'on y plonge,
Faire de son amour un jour au lieu d'un songe,
Et dans cette clarté respirer librement,
Ainsi respirait Laure et chantait son amant.
Vous dont chaque pas touche à la grâce suprême,
C'est vous, la tête en fleurs qu'on croirait sans souci,
C’est vous qui me disiez qu'il faut aimer ainsi.
Et c'est moi, vieil enfant du doute et du blasphème,
Qui vous écoute, et pense, et vous réponds ceci
Oui, l'on vit autrement, mais c'est ainsi qu'on aime
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To give you an idea of my state of mind I can not do better than compare it to one of those rooms we see nowadays in which are collected and mingled the furniture of all times and countries. Our age has no impress of its own. We have impressed the seal of our time neither on our houses nor our gardens, nor on anything that is ours. On the street may be seen men who have their beards trimmed as in the time of Henry III, others who are clean-shaven, others who have their hair arranged as in the time of Raphael, others as in the time of Christ. So the homes of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: the antique, the gothic, the style of the Renaissance, that of Louis XIII, all pell-mell. In short, we have every century except our own — a thing which has never been seen at any other epoch: eclecticism is our taste; we take everything we find, this for beauty, that for utility, another for antiquity, still another for its ugliness even, so that we live surrounded by debris, as if the end of the world were at hand.
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