Alphonse de Lamartine, fully Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine

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

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

The greatness of a popular character is less according to the ratio of his genius than the sympathy he shows with the prejudices and even the absurdities of his time. Fanatics do not select the cleverest, but the most fanatical leaders.

Kindness is virtue itself.

It is admirable to die the victim of one’s faith; it is sad to die the dupe of one’s ambition.

Esteem incites friendship, but not love; the former is the twin brother of Reverence; the latter is the child of Equality.

Enthusiasm is the intoxication of earnestness.

Nature has given women two painful but heavenly gifts, which distinguish them, and often raise them above human nature - compassion and enthusiasm. By compassion, they devote themselves; by enthusiasm they exalt themselves.

Radicalism is but the desperation of logic.

Sentiment is the poetry of the imagination.

Virginity is the poetry, not the reality of life.

When the press is the echo of sages and reformers, it works well; when it is the echo of turbulent cynics, it merely feeds political excitement.

Assassination makes only martyrs, not converts.

Bounded in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who has a recollection of heaven.

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

Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; common sufferings are far strong links than common joys.

He is no true man who ever treats women with anything but the profoundest respect. She is no true woman who cannot inspire and does not take care to enforce this. Any real rivalry of the sexes is the sheerest folly and most unnatural nonsense.

It is the qualities of the heart, not those of the face, that should attract us in women, because the former are durable, the latter transitory. So lovable women, like roses, retain their sweetness long after they have lost their beauty.

Let us enjoy the fugitive hour. Man has no harbor, time has no shore; it rushes on, and carries us with it.

Man never fastened one end of a chain around the neck of his brother, that God did not fasten the other end around the neck of the oppressor.