What I need is a woman who is something, anything: either very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a desire for a woman who embodies distinct characteristics, whether they are positive or negative, rather than being bland or unremarkable.
In this quote, Alfred De Musset articulates the human longing for connection and the complexity of attraction. He suggests that a person's unique traits, whether they be beauty, kindness, wit, or even wickedness, contribute to their allure, emphasizing that it is better to be something distinct than to be mundane or average. This reflects a deeper understanding of love and attraction, which often thrives on contrast and individuality.
In practice
In a romantic context, one might use this quote during a toast at a wedding to highlight the beauty of unique traits in a partner.
Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!
You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep
The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer
life is a deep sleep of which love is the dream
The only true language in the world is a kiss.
A happy memory is perhaps on this earth truer than happiness itself.
If you can really make a man believe you love him, you have won him; and if I could only make people really believe that God loves them, what a rush we would see for the kingdom of God!
Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox.
Some cry: 'Love me!!' Others: 'Don't love me!!' But a certain genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: 'Don't love me and be faithful to me!!'
Thou art my single day, God lends to leaven What were all earth else, with a feel of heaven.
There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing.
What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?
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