Villiers De L'Isle-Adam Quotes & Sayings

Consider this: when you stand at the entry to a steel factory, you can make out through the smoke some men, some metal, the fires. The furnaces roar, the hammers crash; and the metalworkers who forge ingots, weapons, tools, and so on are completely ignorant of the real uses to which their products will be put. The workers can only refer to their products by conventional names. Well, that's where we all stand, all of us! Nobody can see the real character of what he creates because every knife blade may become a dagger, and the use to which an object is put changes both its name and its nature. Only our ignorance shields us from terrible responsibilities. — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

Brunettes are full of electricity. — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

Live? Our servants will do that for us.. — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

I have come with this message: since our gods and our aspirations are no longer anything but scientific, why shouldn't our loves be so too? — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

Nature was quick to pass the sponge of her deluges over these awkward sketches (dinosaurs), these first nightmares of Life. — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

My own self-consciousness cries out to me coldly: how does one love zero? — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

I am a man who knows nothing, guesses sometimes, finds frequently and who's always amazed. — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

Thoughts and feelings change sometimes, as one crosses the frontiers. — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

Within this new work of art a creature from beyond the reach of Humanity has insinuated herself and now lurks there at the heart of the mystery, a power unimagined before our time. — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

The Android, as we've said, is only the first hours of Love, immobilized, the hour of the ideal made eternal prisoner — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

The Earth, dost thou say? What has the Earth ever realized, that drop of frozen mud, whose Time is only a lie in the Heavens? — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

Every human occupation has it repertoire of stock phrases, within which every man twists and turn until his death. His vocabulary, which seems so lavish, reduces itself to a hundred routine formulas at most, which he repeats over and over. — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

There are some wounds that one can heal only by deepening them and making them worse. — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

And in any case ... there are no more supernatural noises nowadays ... — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

Dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss and now too distant ever to be recaptured! ... What sort of arrows would be able to transfix such birds? — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam