Explore Quotes by Alexandre Dumas

If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself.

How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.

Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss.

Pure love and suspicion cannot dwell together: at the door where the latter enters, the former makes its exit.

Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.

For in those tacit understandings which maintain the bond of family union, the mother is really the mistress of her daughter only upon the condition of continually presenting herself to her as a model of wisdom and type of perfection.

The custom and fashion of today will be the awkwardness and outrage of tomorrow - so arbitrary are these transient laws.

God is merciful to all, as he has been to you; he is first a father, then a judge.

If you wish to discover the guilty person, first find out to whom the crime might be useful.

I'm sure you're very nice, but you'd be even nicer if you went away.

...joy takes a strange effect at times, it seems to oppress us almost the same as sorrow.

What a fool I was, not to tear my heart out on the day when I resolved to revenge myself!

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.

When a man resolves to avenge himself, he should first of all tear out the heart from his breast.

He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.

It is not the tree that forsakes the flower, but the flower that forsakes the tree.

Your bitter memories still have time to turn into sweet ones.

Edmond Dantes: I don't believe in God. Abbe Faria: That doesn't matter, He believes in you.

That is a dream also; only he has remained asleep, while you have awakened; and who knows which of you is the most fortunate?

Starvation!" exclaimed the abbe, springing from his seat. "Why, the vilest animals are not suffered to die by such a death as that. The very dogs that wander houseless and homeless in the streets find some pitying hand to cast them a mouthful of bread; and that a man, a Christian, should be allowed to perish of hunger in the midst of other men who call themselves Christians, is too horrible for belief. Oh, it is impossible - utterly impossible!

Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.